Building a Starting Point by Nathan

Building a Starting Point by Nathan - June 2026 Scholarship Essay

When I started building Xfluence, I had never written a line of code. I was eighteen, living in Clifton Forge, Virginia, population 3,500, working construction during the day and teaching myself to program before and after my shifts. There was no coding bootcamp in town. No startup ecosystem. No one I could call and ask for help. I learned from books, YouTube videos, and AI tools, through months of trial and error.

I shipped the platform seven months later. Today it serves over two hundred users across more than twenty countries. But the months I spent struggling through basics, things a weekend workshop or a single mentor could have compressed into days, showed me something about where I grew up. The talent is here. The work ethic is here. What is missing is access to specific knowledge and the people who carry it.

If I could design a project to improve my community, I would build a practical technology and entrepreneurship program for students in the Alleghany Highlands of Virginia.

Here is what it would look like. Once a week, high school students would meet in a local space: a library, a church fellowship hall, a community college classroom. They would learn foundational skills. How to build a basic website. How to set up an online store. How to use free tools to solve real problems. The curriculum would center on building something that works by the end of each session.

The second piece would be mentorship. When I was building Xfluence, the hardest part was having no one to ask whether I was even solving the right problem. A student with a good idea and a mentor who has built something can skip months of wasted effort. The program would connect students with founders, developers, and professionals through video calls. Fifteen minutes a week is enough. The mentors do not need to be local. They just need to be reachable.

The third piece is what matters most: real projects. Students would identify a problem in their own community and build a working solution. A local business needs a better website. A church needs an event registration system. A farmer needs a simple inventory tracker. These problems exist in towns like mine right now, and solving them teaches more than any lecture.

I want to build this because I lived the gap it would fill. I grew up working on a 240-acre family farm, building fences and repairing tractors. I played music at church on Sundays and worked construction through the summers. I earned a 4.0 GPA at Mountain Gateway Community College while building a company and working full-time. I earned all of that through persistence. But I also know how much faster I could have moved with even a small amount of structured support.

Rural communities produce people who know how to work hard, solve problems with limited resources, and show up every day. What they often lack is the specific knowledge that turns all of that effort into economic opportunity. A kid in Clifton Forge who wants to start a business may never have heard of a landing page. A teenager who wants to build an app has no idea where to begin. These are solvable problems. The information already exists, and most of it is free. What is missing is someone to organize it, deliver it, and prove to students that the path is real by showing them someone who walked it.

I am transferring to Ohio State this fall to study business and entrepreneurship. I plan to bring what I learn back. The Alleghany Highlands gave me the work ethic, the independence, and the stubbornness to build something from nothing. A program like this would give the next kid the thing I had to build for myself: a starting point.