The Innovation and Technology Scholarship recognizes students who possess a genuine passion for innovation, commitment to community service, and visionary goals. Constantly seeking new ways to transform the world around them, meet HKUST’s exceptional Innovation and Technology scholars.
“Academics are not my biggest priority at this point. Achieving my dreams of being able to help people is much more rewarding than a number on my transcript,” reveals Rocky Li, a Dual Degree student studying Computer Science and Finance.
As a university freshman, Rocky founded a startup dedicated to producing eco-friendly liquid chalk for rock climbers. Seeking guidance, he connected with the Entrepreneurship Center, where he discovered invaluable opportunities. Among these was the Greater Bay Area Exchange, from which he shares, “Being able to know that these opportunities exist was all thanks to the Entrepreneurship Center.”
Since then, Rocky has stepped away from his startup, yet his connections at the Entrepreneurship Center have persisted – a driving factor behind his scholarship nomination. Now, he hopes to pioneer a much-needed change within the cybersecurity space, sharing that: “It has always been a dream of mine to do something more innovative in the science and technology area. It is harder to do, but it is also more aligned to my interests.”
His interest in cybersecurity sparked during a summer internship when he uncovered a worrisome vulnerability on a major recruitment site, which granted him access to the personal information of countless past applicants. With genuine concern, he expresses, “What scares me is that, if I can find something like that out of the blue, you can only imagine what skilled hackers might be able to do.”
Alarmed by the escalating cyber-crimes in Hong Kong, he is currently constructing a website to track instances of cyberattacks within the city. Through this endeavour, his ultimate goal is to foster knowledge sharing among companies: “What I am trying to do is help Hong Kong learn from its mistakes – the mistakes that one company makes, I would hope to not see happen again somewhere else.”
With his exchange programme at Tsinghua University recently concluding, Rocky looks forward to broadening his entrepreneurial skills in Silicon Valley next. More than that, however, caring for the community remains the heart of his ambitions: “Being able to use my skills to help other people is a really rewarding feeling. If I can do that consistently over the next few years, or even just the next few months, that would be good for me.”
“Where people find success is when they go places that other people don’t have the courage to,” according to Rocky Li. And as his journey progresses, we keenly anticipate where he will make a mark next.