Student at Lawrenceville. Builder everywhere else.

I'm Charlie Axelbaum, eighteen. During term I'm at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey; the rest of the year I build from the San Francisco Bay Area. Most of what I make starts the same way: a system I have to live inside feels tangled, so I build the instrument that makes it readable.

That habit has produced a campus app my classmates check between classes, a civil-unrest monitor that runs on a Raspberry Pi on my desk, a political typology you can walk around in 3D, and a six-key console that runs the lights in my room. It also runs a real business: I design and code websites from scratch for working tradespeople, every cold pitch shipped with the prospect's site already rebuilt as proof.

This summer the same instinct goes offline. Lawrenceville's Welles Award is funding my field study of youth Muay Thai in Northern Thailand: two weeks inside one gym, training in the mornings, taking notes and doing interviews the rest of the day, asking how family economics shape a fighter's childhood.