Beyond the classroom, beyond the doubt: how one Rwandan student followed every question until NVIDIA opened the door.
Published: February 20, 2026
There is a kind of person who stops one step before the breakthrough. And there is a kind of person who does not. This conversation reminded me that you rarely know in the moment which step matters. You just keep going anyway. Praise Manzi has always been that second kind of person, and this is the story of where it took her.
Praise did not grow up in one place.
Her childhood stretched across Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia. She jokes now that she did not realize she was a third culture kid until she arrived in the United States, but those crossings quietly shaped everything. How she reads a room. How she holds complexity. How she carries stories that do not fit neatly into a single frame. By the time she landed in America to study Computer Science, she came carrying the weight of distance from home, the quiet pressure of being one of the "promising ones," and something deeper underneath it all: a desire to use her life in service of others.
And beneath even that, a mantra she still lives by. **
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*"Follow your curiosity."*
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**This is the story of what happens when you actually do.
Before NVIDIA. Before AI research. Before any of it, Praise was a high school student in Rwanda who almost missed the moment that changed everything.
She first heard about Bridge2Rwanda through a friend, almost in passing. She was at Riviera High School, and on that particular afternoon she had just left class exhausted, heading to take a well-earned nap. The application deadline was that same day. School laptops were locked away, and accessing them required a teacher's sign-off.
She could have easily walked past it.
Instead, she and her friend found a way to get their computers, sat down together, and decided to try. They had about thirty minutes. "I typed every response in one sitting. I did not stop to check spelling. I just submitted. Then I went back to the dorms and did not think about it again."
A month later, Bridge2Rwanda called her in for an interview.
That was the moment everything shifted.
They asked about her favorite book. She spoke about We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and once she started, she did not stop. The room grew quiet. At some point, the interviewers looked at each other and said they had heard everything they needed.
"I walked out with this gut feeling I could not name. Like this was the thing I had been searching for my whole life without knowing it."