Before she'd even graduated from her Ottawa high school, Daisy Sheng had influenced the lives of more than 200 learners from 30 countries as a Schoolhouse.world volunteer math teacher. Now a junior artificial intelligence major in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, she's doing the same thing but with a broader scope.

It's no surprise, then, that Sheng earned this year's Scott Robert Krulcik Scholarship in Computer Science.

Founded in 2019 by the Krulcik family to honor their son, the merit-based Krulcik Scholarship acknowledges and rewards a current SCS undergraduate who demonstrates the core traits, attitude and approach that Scott Krulcik (SCS 2018) embodied: a leader with a positive attitude, an insightful and compassionate scholar, an innovative contributor to the SCS community, and an inspiring peer mentor.

Sheng has those qualities in spades.

From an early age, Sheng enjoyed reading about artificial intelligence and its applications in the world.

"I thought, 'Wow, this is so exciting,'" she said. "This is something I want to get into, learn more about and see if there's some way that I could contribute to bringing cool, useful and valuable applications into the world."

That interest led Sheng to Stanford AI4All, a summer camp for high school students where she met people working and studying at the frontier of the field and formed lifelong friendships with fellow campers. At the same time, she was actively involved in competitive math and became fascinated by number theory, geometry and combinatorics. The more she learned, the more she realized that her AI and math experiences were intertwined.

"These two areas ended up converging sometime in high school, and I realized that computer science and AI were something that I wanted to do," Sheng said.

CMU launched its bachelor of science in AI (BSAI) around this same time — which piqued Sheng's interest. She also felt drawn to CMU because of its interdisciplinary approach to CS and its deep roots in AI.

Flash forward, and Sheng arrived on campus as part of the Class of 2026. In the fall of her freshman year, she took an experimental version of 15-112: Fundamentals of Programming, taught by Teaching Professor David Kosbie, that incorporated the curriculum from CMU CS Academy — an SCS initiative that provides free computer science courses and support for nearly 450,000 students in 66 countries. When Kosbie shared that CMU CS Academy was hiring, Sheng applied immediately.

"One of the reasons I was interested in joining the CS Academy team was because contributing to education and helping to create educational opportunities has always been something that I've enjoyed and found fulfilling," she said.

When she first started on the CS Academy team, Sheng worked on the College Programming and Computer Science (CPCS) course, which was a pilot project geared toward high school students looking for a more advanced CS curriculum. She reviewed course content and led training sessions for teachers. The summer after her freshman year, she was promoted to CPCS team lead, and her first task was taking the project from pilot to beta and delivering it to teachers. The deadline? Four months.

She quickly learned how to assess and redistribute resources, to think on her toes and outside the box, and to consult the experts around her for help and advice. It ended up being one of the best experiences she's had at CMU, something she credits to the CPCS team and the high school teachers bringing the course to their students.

As part of her work with CS Academy, Sheng visited Pittsburgh's Central Catholic High School, which used the curriculum in its classrooms. During the visit, she talked with teachers and students, saw the creative projects students were building, noted ideas for additional support for the teacher and student experiences, and learned how they were applying the curriculum in geometry classes. Seeing their work in action and the enthusiasm both students and teachers had for learning made an impression on Sheng.

"It was great to see first-hand how the curriculum has impacted students and teachers. That might really be one of the key moments I've had here at CMU, and it's been inspirational in my own day-to-day," Sheng said.

Sheng retired from her CS Academy role this past fall, but she hasn't stopped educating others. She's an organizing member of CMU's AI in Action Seminar Series, an initiative led by BSAI students that unites the CMU community across disciplines to learn with AI pioneers and visionaries. As part of the group, she planned and hosted a talk by former SCS faculty member and Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton, who spoke to the community virtually in fall 2023. She's also spearheading a video series aimed at current and prospective students featuring CMU AI faculty interviews and chats with students in the BSAI program.

"I'm so lucky to be at CMU, where there are all these opportunities for students and such talented, passionate people," Sheng said. "Getting to interact with and learn from them has broadened my own perspective and made me even more excited about the future of AI."

In her spare time, Sheng's become active in the open-source community, specifically those of Pydantic and PydanticAI. Last summer, she was a machine learning intern at Lazarus AI, and this summer she'll head to San Francisco for an internship with OpenAI.

But despite her AI ambitions, Sheng is remarkably focused on — and grateful to — the people who've helped her.

"If you were to tell 7- or 10-year-old Daisy, 'Hey, this is who you'll become and how much you'll grow,' I would never have thought that would be the case," she said. "But thanks to the people that I've met throughout my journey — my teachers, mentors, people who've guided me — I've achieved things I never imagined."

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Thank Yous

In the spirit of gratitude, Daisy would like to give a big thank you to Teaching Professor David Kosbie and University Teaching Professor of Computer Science Mark Stehlik for the chance to contribute to CMU CS Academy and its mission; Research Professor and BSAI Director Reid Simmons for being such a supportive advisor; Dr. Calitoiu, who was instrumental in her competitive math journey from start to finish; Mr. Fini for inspiring her to get involved in the community in middle school through United Way and Ottawa Hospital fundraising events; her professors and mentors at CMU; and the Krulcik family for the opportunity to honor Scott.