Jonathan Nalikka

Jonathan Nalikka from Germantown, Maryland who plans to study Computer Science in SEAS. Both of his parents were born in Kampala, Uganda, but he was born and raised in Maryland. He went to the IB program at Richard Montgomery High School, where he found his passion for computer science.

In his junior year Jonathan reached out to professor Paul Cockshott, an economist and computer scientist at the University of Glasgow, to conduct research on a paper proving the labor theory of value.

For the paper Jonathan pulled wage and working hours data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, with information on 225 sectors of the US economy. He used Excel to format the data and used a self written Java program to perform calculations on the data. The results showed strong correlations between total labor hours worked and total dollar output amongst sectors. Jonathan submitted the paper for review at multiple journals, and it was deemed “a high level for a high schooler” and “ambitious” submitted for review to Science and Society and Monthly Review, although it ultimately was not published.

He served as captain of his high school’s speech and debate team, which came second in the county when he was captain, and captain of his school’s school's computer team. Jonathan also worked as a Sensei at Code Ninjas, a company that taught young children computer programming. Jonathan would supervise children for after school check in as they completed coding problems and would help them with whatever question they had, while also grading submitted assignments and cleaning the “dojo” in the meantime. He also ran summer camps over 2020 and 2021, virtual and in person. In addition, Jonathan worked at his local library as a shelving page, and was a Software Engineering intern at a company called HKP Solutions in his junior year.

In his free time, Jonathan runs a TikTok where he covers politics and economics, usually doing a voiceover of a cooking video. Currently he has 136,000 followers.

Jonathan aims to go into Software Engineering, and help the tech world become more equitable and ethical, while also advocating for social justice and political change in his free time.