After leaving home at fourteen, former Selwyn undergraduate James He (SE 2019) used the College’s network to cross disciplines and follow his curiosity, transforming an interdisciplinary education into a venture-backed startup and opening doors for others.

Growing up at the foothills of the Chinese Tibetan Plateau, in a family where no one went to university, the expectation was that you would find a trade and maybe open a store. However, my parents also cared about my education. They found teachers who taught me poetry, art and history and that was what first made me curious about the wider world. So, when I was thirteen, I suggested going to school abroad, and somehow, they agreed. I left home at fourteen to go to New Zealand on my own.

A few years later, I applied to the University of Cambridge with an open application. I only got my passport back with the visa six hours before my 27-hour journey to the UK for interviews. Having great faith in their son, my parents’ first reaction to my Selwyn offer was, “Are you sure this isn’t a scam?”

I arrived not knowing what to expect. The winter darkness was a shock after New Zealand’s brightness, and it took time to feel at home. But somewhere in the middle of second year, I realised how lucky I was and decided to make the most of it. I moved to Psychological and Behavioural Sciences to understand how culture shapes human outcomes. We are social animals; how we do in life is influenced by the people around us. Having moved between cultures myself, I’d seen that first hand, and I wanted to study it.

Then came the pandemic. A curse for obvious reasons, but a blessing too. I spent a lot of time in the library, watched the new one being built outside my window, and one day picked up a book on modelling how opinions spread through social networks. That changed everything. I started working with academics across departments, published my first papers, and eventually led a study that put 33,000 AI chatbots on social media to see how they’d behave. It was that summer at Selwyn that gave me the freedom to build bridges across disciplines. I moved between psychology and computer science, ancient philosophy and simulation.

All of it led to founding Artificial Societies, now backed by Y Combinator and global investors with over $5 million in funding, building technology that simulates how groups of people react to the decisions that matter most. I wouldn’t have imagined this when I first arrived but it was my time at Selwyn that gave me the opportunity to explore ideas across disciplines. That’s why, when I got my first pay cheque, I set up a scholarship. I want to pass on the freedom for someone else to cross boundaries, just like I did.