Seventeen-year-old Angelina Tsuboi is no stranger to success. She has been coding since the age of 7 and has extensive knowledge of about 18 programming languages, including her own. Tsuboi has been making waves in the software world through her numerous apps that solve real-life problems. She even won the Student Swift Challenge at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) last year.
Apart from her software accomplishments, Tsuboi is also a pilot, and she uses her skillset to make the aviation industry more accessible. On top of that, she has aspirations to pursue a multidisciplinary career in mechatronics and analog astronautics.
Tsuboi spoke with Entrepreneur and discussed her early successes, her experience at WWDC 2022, and her plans for the future. She first got interested in programming through a class in school when she was just 7 years old. From there, she developed a passion for creating applications that could make a significant impact in the world.
I have an engineer’s mindset, where whenever I see a problem, I’m not complacent about it. I always want to take action, Tsuboi said.
One of her earliest applications was aimed at providing single parents with valuable resources, such as access to housing organizations, grants, job opportunities, and translation support. Tsuboi’s mother, a single parent herself, moved to the US from Japan with three children and had language barrier issues. This experience inspired Tsuboi to create an app that could benefit others in similar situations.
Another app she developed was to help aspiring aviators locate scholarships to fund their expensive flight training in Los Angeles. Her app, Pilot Fast Track, has helped thousands of people.
Additionally, Tsuboi created CPR Buddy, which complements another app she made for the Apple Watch called Pocket CPR. She used the Apple Watch‘s haptic feedback feature to help people learn CPR’s basic principles.
Last year, Tsuboi won the Student Swift Challenge at Apple’s WWDC. At the event, she had the opportunity to learn about the latest hardware and software developments and connect with other like-minded developers. Perhaps the biggest highlight of the event for Tsuboi was when she and other winners got the surprise visit of a lifetime from Apple CEO Tim Cook, who sat down with them to discuss their apps.
Tsuboi’s career ambitions are diverse, including aerospace cybersecurity, mechatronics development, and analog astronautics. She is currently working on an open-source, low-cost buoy device that can detect tsunamis and hopes to make the technology more accessible to researchers in disadvantaged areas.
Although Tsuboi has her sights set on attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she knows it is a challenging school to get into. Regardless, she plans to continue pursuing her projects professionally, which include developing software and building mechatronics and analog astronautics systems.
