November + December's Reverbs.

Meeting Nadeem (co-founder of TKS), GFSMUN, Exams, Hackathons, living alone and so much more.

Jan 04, 2023

Hey there 👋

My name is Rhythm Doshi and I am a 15-year-old that lives in Dubai ✨ I am obsessed with self-development & growth, It has transitioned to becoming an ideal/principle that is firmly etched and woven into the fabric of my life’s principles.

⚡My natural inclinations revolve around:

blockchain, cryptocurrencies, & decentralization of the future.
astrophysics and space tech.
philosophy & philosophical frameworks.
consciousness, meditation, and enlightenment.
neuroscience and psychology
psychedelics & ego-dissolution.
building startups and products, economics & business

The aim of this newsletter is to deliver monthly updates about my life, the projects/cool things I’m working on, unique experiences and all the lessons I’m learning along the way.

It’s time to dive into this packed but fun month of November.

🏛️ GFSMUN’2

November started off with a bang! I attended GFSMUN’2 and was honored to serve the role as the Head Chair of General Assembly 3 alongside my wonderful and extremely talented Co-Chairs — Naira & Tamanna (huge shoutout to y’all.) I had such a blast and this MUN definitely comes under the list of the best MUNs I’ve ever attended. The socials night was definitely the highlight of the conference.

From organizing committee at 8 AM in the morning to partying in the socials night till 8 PM in the evening was a whole package of craziness. I had tons of fun and made so many memories and new homies. Huge shoutout to Falah and the sec team for making this MUN a huge success and fulfilling my wish. (Falah, I know you’re reading this, you know what I’m talking about ;)) Overall I had a lovely time at GFSMUN and would love to be back at it next year.

🧑‍🍳Living Alone + 📝 Exam Season:

Your boy’s parents went to India for about 3 weeks this month and was living alone with his younger brother. At this point, living alone for a short period of time has become a tradition. For the past 3 years my parents have been leaving my brother and I alone for a short period of time cause It’s impractical for me to travel during non-vacation days. I cannot even begin to explain how much living alone and taking up so many responsibilities at the age of 15 has taught me. I personally believe in the fact that learning from experiencing is the most effective way of retaining knowledge. As they say, A complete beginner that plays football for 15 minutes on the pitch is way better than a person that learns about football for an entire year.

Along with me being alone, I had super important exams going on. This meant I had to cook, clean, study, balance other life stuff & extra-curriculars. It was a sneak peak into how I would be living in college. Living alone is a crazy experience and here are some of my takeaways:

💪 Takeaways:

I learnt how to manage my stress by cooking!?
Me being a person who gets anxious quiet often and is very bad with stress in general, I found cooking a unique way to manage stress. Cooking is something that requires to be calm under various situations. Maintaining composure when working with fire or when the cooker doesn’t work, comes with good pressure management. Cooking eventually became therapeutic and over the period of three weeks I definitely saw the shades change. I went from burning the f*ck out of my fingers to cooking like a pro with elite stress management.

I can proudly cook over a hundred dishes and it’s to safe to say I’ll survive in college :) Here are some of the cool things I made whilst living alone:
Maturity & Responsibility:
I went from acting like my parents to sort of becoming like one. I went from telling my brother to go to bed early to imitate my parents to actually meaning it. Responsibility is something I go up a level whenever I’m left alone. My parents have instilled a lot of values that has matured and was put into action when they were away.

Responsibility sure is taking care of things like cooking, cleaning etc but it also comes in small pressure packages like making sure if the gas is not left on by accident, or if the lights are not left on when going outside, or locking the main door of the house before bed, making sure leftovers go to the fridge and so many more little things.

These are things that we don’t realize until we’re left by ourselves. This goes to show how much our parents actually do for us, they carry so much pressure on their backs, it really does hit you like a train, atleast it did for me.

Living alone sure brings a lot of external freedom but adds another thick layer of worry/stress reducing mental freedom, This was the third time I was left alone so it was definitely a whole lot easier.

Overall, everything about living alone was adrenaline boosting, exciting and fun except the part where I had to wake up at 7 am to cook 😭

🦾 Attending Prototypes for Humanity

I attended an event called Prototypes for Humanity in mid-November with one of my good friends Mariam and had an extremely fun time. Prototypes for Humanity was an event that displayed a hundred prototypes with the potential to change the course of humanity and disrupt our world, the prototypes were developed by students from universities like Harvard, MIT etc. We had tons of fun networking, gaining insight and deeply understanding the concept/working behind each of the prototypes and in general was a unique experience.

I documented my time at the event in a mini-vlog, click on the button to watch the reel ;)

Prototypes for Humanity Mini-vlog

🎈Meeting Nadeem Nathoo + TKS UAE Fam

🤝 Meeting Nadeem:
In the month of November, Mia Aiyana, Mia Aailiya, Mariam & I had a meetup with the co-founder of TKS — Nadeem Nathoo and had an insightful conversation for about 1.5 hours!

🎳 TKS Dubai Meetup:

In the latter part of December, The TKS UAE family had a meetup! we went out to play bowling and had tons of fun especially meeting each other in-person. Loved interacting with each one of you and a huge shoutout to Rayhan, Mariam, Mia, Ahmad & Fatima!

ps: Ahmad, We’ll take Rayhan down next time, ifykyk ;)

🧑‍💻Hackathons @ TKS + American University of Sharjah.

In the months of November & December I attended/participated in two hackathons and had a blast!

💻 Explore Hackathon Week at TKS:
In November I participated in the Explore Hackathon Week TKS and worked on AborChain, a revolutionary app that stores menstrual cycle data on the blockchain to prevent it from going into the hands of governments alongside Aaryan, Mia, Lars & Jiya (W team, huge shoutout to you guys)

The problem we tackled was the rising rates of incarceration of women due to them opting for an Abortion. Governments acquiring sensitive data from apps that track menstrual cycles of thousands of women was at the core of them figuring out if a woman had gotten an Abortion or not. To solve this, we eliminated the centralized factor of all these applications that track menstrual cycles and are pressurized/forced to handover that data to the governments. Our solution — AborChain preserves that data on the blockchain, this not only prevents the data from being exploited by governments but also safeguards & secures the data on a private Blockchain.

🤖 AI Workshop + Hackathon at The American University of Sharjah
In early December I was selected to attend an AI Workshop + Hackathon organized by one of the best universities in the country — The American University of Sharjah under Prof. Dr. Imran Zualkernan & Salsabeel Shapsough. It was a crazy 2 full days of learning, building & networking.

We had workshops in the morning where we delved deep into Convulational Neural Networks, Diffusion Models & touched over Deep Learning. As part of my builds, I built an AI model that detects yoga posture and prompts the person whether to improve or not. As part of my hackathon build, I trained an AI model with an Accuracy of 100% and an F1 Score of 99.8% and ended up winning 2nd place along with a prize money of 200 Dhs.

All in all I exponentially grew over the period of 2 days and took a plunge & gained a lot of knowledge in the field of Artificial Intelligence.

📸 Hackathon Captures:

🛍️Working w/ Walmart to Disrupt Retail

Walmart Defies Gloom Over Inflation With Sales and Profit Upgrade - The New York Times

I spent my November working with a billion dollar retail superstore — Walmart to change the course & re-imagine the future of retail. I was part of the DreamSpace alongside Ada, Rana & Jiya and here is the challenge statement:

"How can Walmart improve the customer experience by developing simple & scalable in-store digital touch points or experiences that further connect customers into our digital journey?”

From jumping on team-syncs in the night, to watching hundreds of UI Designing tutorials to spending hours on Figma figuring sh*t out. We spent hours reading articles, reports & papers along with reaching out to a whole lot of experts. We put most of our energy & focus on understanding the problem than the solution itself and that was single handedly the best thing we did.

📸 Group picture check:

We developed a solution to improve in-store experience by completely eliminating lines at the checkout. Yes, you read that right. We found out that the average waiting time at a Walmart store is 11 minutes and during festive seasons like Christmas it peaks to 50-70 minutes 🤯

💡Our Solution: An app integration that let’s you book your spot in the line and notifies the customer when their turn comes! This not only reduces waiting time & saves a whole lot of time, but prioritizes senior citizens/differently-abled citizens & takes stress off the cashiers/employees that work so hard managing customers & long queues.

To learn more about our solution, have a look at our stand-alone slide deck:

Recommendation Deck to Walmart

All in all it was a crazy learning experience and I developed ❇️ skills that I would barely be able to in a year’s time in a month.

🧘‍♂️Life Lately:

I spent my December sipping on ☕hot chocolates and spending quality time with my Family & Friends. One of our family friends hosted us to watch the FIFA World Cup Final and we had some crazy fun. I’ve been a Messi fan for as long as I remember and seeing him lift that trophy was a special moment for my inner child. We also hit the Expo City and played a bunch of carnival games, watched live shows and walked around in the beautiful weather. We spent our NYE watching an event that was being live-streamed from India sadly we couldn’t make it to the event that we always go to in December :((
December was a cozy month and I shared/cherished a lot of memories in it <3.

🔗 Focusing on Blockchain:

I am currently pursuing a Focus in Blockchain and November along with December has been me dabbling around here and there trying to learn/gain as much as exposure in this sphere. I have been researching/consuming content and generally have been diving deep into the world of DApps, Smart Contracts, & the Web3. I wrote an in-depth article to get your first foot into the realm of Blockchain, do consider checking it out :))

Blockchain: Block by Block

ps: if you’re interested in Blockchain, email me your name & why you are excited in this space, at rhythmdoshi50@gmail.com, I’ll hit you up with a custom-made resource pack with articles & videos to get you started in this space.