Kiran McCulloch

About

Kiran McCulloch is, in brief, a man of elegant solutions. From the moment an idea pops into his head, his enthusiasm for the task at hand becomes unmatchable. He is governed by a desire to create. Similarly, his fervor for learning often leaves him with several Wikipedia tabs open or hours spent doing online trivia. McCulloch alone is a force to be reckoned with, but given the right tools and let into a room with similarly driven individuals, infinity's the limit.

Skills

Coding

Having grown up as a self-described "Lego kid,"^[1] McCulloch's fascination with coding as a building-block-like tool has been noted from a very young age. Regarding programming as the ultimate creative outlet, McCulloch is proficient in several programming languages such as Python, Java, Javascript, C, C++, and PHP, having worked with them extensively throughout high school and university alike, both in class and on personal time. University courses have provided similar ventures into SQL, Bash, OCaml, and several others. In addition, he remains very familiar with HTML and CSS, as well as the suite of popular web development frameworks like JQuery, React.js and Node.js. He is currently learning Swift, being that it is used to create some of the most powerful mobile applications available when wielded with enough expertise.

Geography

McCulloch's pet passion has always been geography, from a very basic level, such as memorizing all the world capitals and flags, to a very advanced one, like creating his own LIDAR-based watershed delineation algorithm. Having further expanded his knowledge with a broad range of studies in the subject at university, he continues to try find a way back to use it in any possible project.

Design

Creativity is at the heart of everything McCulloch does. His earliest several jobs were all editing-focused, and since then he has ventured into web design, photography, vector graphics, animation, film, photobashing, printing, and more.^[2] Possessing a significant amount of work experience, McCulloch is well-known as a designer in his social circles, often acting as a go-to source for social media posts and advertisements but also picking up more consistent extracurricular work at times. Photoshop and Premiere are the most used tools to this end, but After Effects, Illustrator, and Final Cut often make appearances.

History

Early Life

Kiran McCulloch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the turn of the millennium. Several years later, McCulloch, along with his parents and sisters, would move to a nearby suburb, where he would reside for more than a decade before his eventual move to Canada. McCulloch has, somewhat hyperbolically, described Philadelphia as "the greatest city on the planet"^[3] and remains fiercely proud of his city to this day.

Schooling

After attending a small private school in the suburbs for almost eight years, McCulloch made the move in 2012 to Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood. It was here that he took his first coding classes and competed in his first hackathon, later citing these experiences as heavy inspiration for his future work.^[4]

The looming end of high school presented a difficult decision as to where to attend university; with multiple offers of equal academic caliber on the table, the choice would come down to personal preference.^[5] In the spring of 2018, McCulloch visited Montreal for the first time in his life, and, seeing its quality, made the decision to attend McGill University that fall.

Over the next four years, McCulloch built valuable skills and greatly expanded upon his knowledge base, taking courses in Algorithm Design, Web Development, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence, among many others. McCulloch also pursued his passion for geography, taking courses in such topics as hydrology, climatology, human geography, and meteorology. Despite the breakout of a worldwide pandemic in his second year, McCulloch completed his studies in 2022, graduating with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a minor in geography.

Work Experience

The precise start date of McCulloch's career remains a hotly debated topic among historians,^[6] but most sources place it in 2013, when, while at sleepaway camp, the head of the Video Department trusted McCulloch, a child, with the keys to the computer room, citing his work ethic and technological zeal, but more likely than not also taking advantage of the free labor. Since then, McCulloch has always been comfortable working in a collaborative environment, and teamwork remains a staple of his projects.

The proper start came in 2017 when a month-long internship at a film studio provided McCulloch with his first foray into a professional environment. Despite returning to school shortly after, he gained valuable experience working in a fast-paced environment. In 2019, After his first year at university, McCulloch found a job at the Academy of Natural Sciences in downtown Philadelphia, working as an environmental researcher, combining his passions of coding and geography into one. Here, he was truly a young professional, developing a codebase on the then-unused Google Earth Engine. In 2020, immediately after the pandemic hit, McCulloch worked for a while as IT support for Verizon, spending the summer dealing with hardware problems as opposed to the software he was more used to.

Despite being busy with classes, McCulloch also found time to take on scores of freelance design projects for friends, family, and paying clients alike. It was here that he began to combine his talents once more, and found a taste for Web Development, being a combination of design and coding, much like his job at the Academy years prior had been a fusion of coding and geography. Naturally, then, his work in these years tended towards the arts, working remotely for a design firm in Boston and then heading the Graphics Division in a student-led project at McGill.