Nicolas Monzon

Nicolas Monzon is a computer science student at Universidad Argentina De la Empresa (UADE).

Growing up in a poor neighbourhood, going to university wasn't a possibility as Nicolas didn't know universities existed.  He worked throughout high school in manual labor jobs, reading about mathematics, his passion, in his free time. When he joined the charity Jovenes en Acción (JEA) as a volunteer, his life changed. JEA encouraged him to go to UADE and apply for a scholarship, in turn allowing him to get his first professional job and start studying mathematics at UBA, another university in Argentina.

From there he never looked back, co-founding the IT consultancy Magnetar. Throughout his journey, Nicolas never lost sight of his hometown and has motivated many of his childhood friends to study, grow as people, and follow their dreams. One of his childhood friends was inspired by Nicolas to study computer science and now works at Magnetar.

Volunteering has always been close to Nicolas’s heart. He worked for Vida Solidaria which feeds the homeless, and he was also a paramedic in children's hospitals. Nicolas has also worked for Dale Tu Mano, an organization dedicated to helping the most vulnerable neighbourhoods of the country. Working for JEA since 2014 in a number of different areas, he has supported young people who have been abandoned, helped uplift poor and underfunded neighborhoods, given special tutorials, and led special days and outings for youth to cinemas and theatres.

Nicolas also reformed JEA from within, enabling it to expand its work and be more efficient, and also ran events on behalf of JEA to raise awareness among the public. He helped JEA expand to the province of Mendoza to help people without resources in the area, and interviewed guests for its radio program. Nicolas also participated as part of the JEA team in SABF, an event that ITBA carries out annually selecting the best students from around the world who want to help the world to be a better place.

A member of Mensa, Nicolas juggled two STEM degrees and believes the thesis he is working on could be his biggest success so far. It deals with the creation of a quantum computing language that allows tracking data types for Qubits, and passing them from one base to another.

Nicolas regularly returns to his high school as a guest to give talks and encourage students to apply to college. Many have approached him looking for a contact and mentor and he keeps in regular contact to lend his advice and support. Today, for example, one is finishing his physical education teacher training while another has been inspired to study computer engineering like Nicolas.

If Nicolas won the Global Student Prize, in the short term he would like to support JEA and help his family, while in the longer term he would invest in his startup. Nicolas firmly believes that technology is the future so he would open a research and development function at his startup and launch a training course so that he could hire more people.