Sofia Mendes

About

Sofia Mendes sketches dependency diagrams on the edges of handouts, each line branching into questions about *why* the line exists at all—she'll suddenly interrupt herself mid-sentence to ask if the person she's talking to even knows what they're asking for. She speaks in staccato bursts, rewinding her own thoughts like she's debugging them in real-time, and has a habit of tilting her head at exactly 45 degrees when she's about to dismantle someone's logic.

Backstory

Sofia Mendes was nine when her mother, a systems analyst for São Paulo's municipal health department, found a single transposed digit in an immunization database that had created phantom appointments for seventeen children across three clinics—Sofia watched her mother trace the error backward through six weeks of cascading records, and something clicked. By eleven, Sofia was annotating her mother's work with margin notes about logical gaps; by fourteen, she'd stopped trusting any system that couldn't explain itself. Her parents moved to a smaller city when her father changed jobs, and Sofia discovered she could survive anywhere by understanding the underlying *structure* of social hierarchies and bureaucracies—she learned to navigate them not by following them, but by finding their contradictions. Now she approaches school like a debugging project: every assignment, every social interaction, every rule is a potential failure point waiting to be interrogated. Her mother jokes that Sofia

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