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<span style="font-size:medium">Alex Santarelli<br/></span>

<span style="font-size:medium">http://universityinnovation.org/images/b/b2/DSC07362_copy.jpg</span>

<span style="font-size:small">UIF Fellow 2018/2019 @ Loyola University Maryland</span> <u><span style="font-size:small">About me:</span></u> I had an unconventional path for my college experience. My father passed away when first year in college was at Loyola University Maryland where I served as a UIF fellow for my school. After my first year at Loyola, I wanted to work with my best friend Samir and be in a city. So I ended up transferring into New York University. Whenever I didn’t have classes I was six years oldworking on projects with Samir. We ended up on a whim making Spotify wrapped but for Apple Music because we were feeling left out. What I learned from him passing An awesome by product of making that app was that I want<br[https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/26/>apple-music-subscribers-can-now-get-their-own-year-in-review-too-thanks-to defy the odds -this-app/ TechCrunch], [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/26/18156750/apple-music-year-in-review-listening-habits-2018-app-noisehub theVerge] and people's expectations[https://www.billboard.com/pro/app-year-in-review-apple-music-noisehub/ Billboard] ended up writing an article about it. I want Fast forward to change the world second semester at NYU (Spring 2019), classes weren’t very engaging and I have didn’t feel like it was worth the tuition I had to pay as a certain force<br/>in me transfer student. Looking for something fun to do over the summer that never stopswasn’t working for NYU (I had a job there as a Lead UX Designer, to help pay the bills). This force has allowed me to pursue I reconnected with my passion of impacting people through<br/>technology by learning to create iOS appsfriend Dylan who I met many years ago at Facebook’s F8 conference. Dylan and I have created eight met originally because we had both made apps for our high school and were able to dateattend the conference because we won a student scholarship with our apps. My school app was focused on utility features, ranging from his was focused on social features. He ended up raising a seed round and was looking for a<brfounding engineer to help build out the company. [https://www.joinsaturn.com/>Saturn is a social network calendar for musichigh schools.]  Late Spring 2019 I joined Saturn and was the first engineer of the company. Saturn was going really well, I loved what I was doing, education apps using iBeaconswas learning more than I was in school, and I even convinced Samir to join and be the founding designer for the company. NYU let us take 1 year of absence without having to decide whether we were going to leave school or not. A year after I joined Saturn we were in the middle of Covid; paying full tuition for zoom classes and potentially missing out on Saturn wasn’t something I wanted to do. I dropped out. Saturn grew a running calculatorlot while I was there. My passion has<br/>also fueled my interest in meeting new 3 years later when I left due to burn out, we had 50 people at the company and raised a large Series A! The engineering team itself had over 20 peopleon it. I built the core app experience at Saturn with the help of some incredible teammates over those 3 years. A lot of complex problems that we encountered at Saturn, traveling used human centered design to solve.  The past year I was working at another start up called Fam, which was a houseparty video chat clone and sadly with the weststate of the market and the app not being a true business, and I had to start taking those first<br/>steps in impacting people's livesthinking about what might be next.<br/><br/>I cannot wait learned so much from engineering from the ground up that I wanted to experience how engineering at a large company works. Now I’m at Robinhood as an iOS Engineer.  In my free time I work on various app + business ideas that I get really excited about. Education is something I’m starting to focus on again because I think it is one of the hardest places to institute change, but the most rewarding and meet you to see all necessary. I think the amazing ideas we have intersection between AI and things Education will cause a lot of disruption in ways we will createcan’t even imagine at the moment. I’m also super into music, still iterating on new music app concepts.