Tanay Patri has only been on campus for six weeks, but he’s already joined three student groups—NU Hacks, the Chess Club, the Debate Society—and made it his mission to do his first co-op with FiveThirtyEight, the popular polling and analysis website.

“I’m really excited about being involved in the Northeastern community,” says Patri, a first-year data science major. “I want to build relationships with my peers and find my passion as soon as I can.”

He chose Northeastern to be part of its thriving community of young scholars, students with an insatiable appetite for knowledge and discovery. “When I visited campus for the first time, I met a lot of students who not only thought big, but had great ideas and wanted to act on them,” he says. “That inspired me to see Northeastern as a place where I could grow a lot over the next several years.”

Patri, CIS’21, comes to Northeastern from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he honed his passion for learning. He performed well in his many advanced placement classes at the McCallie School—from Spanish and literature to calculus and biology—and became the first high school student ever to present a paper at the Georgia Tech Fault Analysis and Distribution Conference. He served as a member of the Chattanooga Mayor’s Youth Council, where he worked to improve the lives of kids in the community, and even won an engineering award from the Office of Naval Research for designing a low-cost prosthetic charging device.

Math and science have long been his favorite subjects, driving his interest in the way things work. “I like to analyze things,” he says. “When I see numbers, my mind starts turning and I start thinking about what I can do with them.”

If he had his druthers, Patri would parlay his passion for facts and figures into a career in financial consulting. His sharp communication skills—which he started honing five years ago, as an eighth-grader invited to compete for his local high school’s debate team—make him an even stronger candidate to excel in the demanding role. “I’m a good problem solver with an ability to apply principles to a range of different situations,” he explains, “but I think I’m also good at exploring ideas and working with others.”

Patri has made a point of meeting as many new people as he can. His residence hall—International Village—has been a particularly good meeting place, where he’ll often sit and chat with his peers, trading stories about class, co-op, and everything in between. “I think the Northeastern education is fantastic, but it wouldn’t be half as valuable if not for the people I’ve met,” he says. “Here, there is an incredible amount of brain power, experience, and drive to do great things.”