About

I am a senior at Livingston High School with interests in data science, economics, public policy, and competitive debate.

Vedant Tripathi
Livingston, New Jersey

Over the past several years I have built skills in data analysis, statistical reasoning, research, and communication through national-level Public Forum debate, advanced STEM coursework, and independent research projects. I like using data and evidence to understand complicated problems, and then explaining clearly what I found.

Debate is where that started. I have competed on the national circuit for three seasons, cleared to elimination rounds at Harvard, Georgetown, and Notre Dame, and earned a Silver bid to the 2026 Tournament of Champions at #22 in the country. I am captain of our Speech & Debate club, and I have coached middle and high school debaters since 2024.

The research grew out of the same habit. I spent a school year building a lagged regression model tracing how producer prices flow into consumer prices across 78 years of U.S. data; the manuscript is now under peer review. This summer, as an AI and data engineering intern at Blackstraw, I built LensIQ, a chatbot that lets plant supervisors and quality teams ask questions of manufacturing data in plain English instead of waiting on a data team.

Outside all of that, I have helped run Livingston Youth Leaders since 2021, the nonprofit I co-founded and now lead as president.

I am most interested in where data science, economics, public policy, artificial intelligence, and decision-making meet.

Details

School
Livingston High School, Aug 2023 – May 2027
Event
Public Forum debate, varsity/open division
Focus
Data science, economics, and public policy
Activities
Speech & Debate Club (captain), Coding Club (vice president), Key Club, FBLA, junior varsity tennis, orchestra (violin)
Coursework
AP Calculus AB, AP Statistics, AP Computer Science A, AP Physics 1, AP Microeconomics, AP U.S. History; senior year AP Macroeconomics, AP Computer Science Principles, AP Physics Mechanics, AP Psychology
University
NYU GSTEM Data Science Program, Feb – May 2026 · Coding Academy, Tufts University, Jul 2025
Tools
Python, pandas, scikit-learn, SQL, Azure Databricks, R, Java, Jupyter, Git
Otherwise
First-degree black belt in Taekwondo, CPR certified