Gary Sheng

About Gary

• I spent the first 22 years of my life setting myself up to climb the corporate ladder—I worked hard to test into a magnet high school where I led multiple clubs so I could get into a good college.
• I went to Duke University where I focused on getting good grades in order to land internships.
• I was able to get an internship with Google as a software engineering intern, which then led to a full-time position with Google as a software engineer team lead after I graduated.
• My only two priorities after graduating were to host fun parties and to get promoted at work.
• When the 2016 presidential election happened, I realized I didn’t know much about how the world works, so I started getting into online activism.
• As I got more involved in activism, I started to lose myself in the anger surrounding major political issues and wasn’t able to maintain good relationships with my loved ones anymore.
• I decided to spend the next year humbly learning, thinking about our democracy, and trying to understand how we’d become so polarized.
• I eventually met my co-founders for Civics Unplugged—we realized if we didn’t do something about our democracy now, it would fall apart, so we created our organization to help Gen Z create change.