How Building Apps Led Me to Cybersecurity by Rehman

How Building Apps Led Me to Cybersecurity by Rehman - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

When I was younger I built computers and flipped them for money. I liked figuring out how every part worked with the others, and I liked that someone would actually pay for something I put together.

That curiosity turned into the real question I keep coming back to: once you build something, how do you keep it safe? My team and I released an app called Mealkit on the App Store this past August. It scans what's in your fridge and pantry and builds recipes from what you already have, and it's available in 127 countries now. Every time we push an update, the same thought is there. Something I build is something somebody could try to break into.

I tested that question on a smaller project. For Rubicon Marketing, the agency I co-founded, I developed an AI-assisted process for taking outdated small business websites and turning them into modern, mobile-friendly ones. Each site I touched was a new case study in the same problem. Build it so it works first, then go back and ask what a stranger could do to it that I didn't plan for. I also built an SAT prep platform with 991 official College Board practice questions, which taught me the same lesson from the other side, that a system only works if people can actually trust it to run the same way every time.

None of this was assigned to me. I did it because I wanted to see if I could, and the pattern repeated enough times that it turned into an actual plan. Study cybersecurity in college, take machine learning and data classes alongside it, and keep building my own things on the side. I want to know how to build something and how to keep it safe. That is the subject I keep deepening my understanding of, one project at a time.