(September 21, 2025) In the spring of 2020, as classrooms everywhere shifted to screens, seventh-grader Ruby Arun discovered herself in an unusual situation: a one-student advanced math class on Zoom. The scheduling quirk paired her with a young teacher day after day, just the two of them working through proofs while the pandemic raged. At home, Ruby was the daughter of Indian immigrants who prized education as the surest path to possibility. Her father had earned an MBA from the University of Chicago and built a demanding consulting career, while her mother spent two decades in corporate roles before starting her own business. Their journey, filled with long hours and deliberate choices, taught Ruby that effort, not circumstance, determines success.
Ruby Arun
Yet she couldn’t shake what she was seeing beyond that solitary virtual classroom. Friends who were just as capable were quietly backing away from math, convinced they “just weren’t math people.” Even her math-loving teacher admitted to early doubts about her own abilities. Ruby, who had competed in math contests since childhood and grown up surrounded by grandparents with doctorates in the subject, found the retreat alarming. If confidence could be learned, as her parents had always insisted, perhaps it could also be taught.
That conviction became action. With homework finished and the long pandemic evenings stretching ahead, she drafted names and mission statements on scrap paper and imagined a mentoring program that could reach anxious students in their own homes. In May 2020 she launched Mission:MathMinds, a free virtual service pairing high-school girls who needed volunteer hours with younger students who needed calm guidance. Within a year the experiment was helping hundreds of children, many of them girls who had once thrown tantrums over homework but now worked problems aloud with pride.
From a living-room idea to global reach
Five years later Ruby Arun is a first-year student at Harvard University, studying Applied Mathematics with Economics and Computer Science, and Mission:MathMinds has become a global nonprofit with measurable scale: more than 21,000 girls reached and an estimated $1.4 million in economic impact. The organization partners with the United Nations, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs to deliver mentoring, workshops, and national conferences while distributing educational resources around the world.
Happy kids after a Mission:MathMinds session
Recognition has matched the growth. In 2025 Ruby was selected for the 37th class of Coca-Cola Scholars, joining 150 young leaders worldwide and receiving a $20,000 scholarship and a place in a network of more than 7,000 alumni. The United Nations, the U.S. Congress, and the Illinois Governor’s Office have all honored her work, and she has received the Congressional Gold Service Award for leadership and community service.
Math first: The METS philosophy
Central to Mission:MathMinds is Ruby’s insistence that math is the gateway to the rest of STEM. She even rearranged the acronym to call it METS, putting Math first. “If a student gets stuck with math at maybe third or fourth grade, it’s pretty much guaranteed they won’t even explore the STEM field,” she explained in a 2023 podcast interview. Her programs show how classroom math powers real-world problems, answering the question every student asks, ‘when will I use this?’ with concrete applications drawn from engineering, science, and technology.
Programs that multiply impact
The nonprofit now operates on four interlocking fronts. The mentoring program that began during lockdown continues to connect high-school mentors with younger students, sometimes logging over a hundred sessions each week. The Female Role Models network has grown to more than forty accomplished women, including public figures such as Senator Tammy Duckworth, who share candid stories of challenge and success. Ruby expanded the mission beyond U.S. borders as well: over successive summers she hosted math programs for Ukrainian refugee children in Poland, delivering lessons and distributing resources through United Nations partnerships. Community book drives collected 15,000 books, with about 8,000 shipped to Poland and other European centers, and more shipments are planned.
Book collection drive by Ruby and volunteers for Ukrainian refugee kids
Annual national conferences have become a signature. The 2022 and 2023 events brought state-of-the-art math and science equipment to students and educators, with more than thirty female STEM leaders inspiring hundreds of participants. The next gathering, Mission:MathMinds 2025 National Conference: Hacking STEM’s Social Equation, will convene female founders, Yale program leads, Stanford engineers, and major brand partners for a virtual summit and a Social Impact Pitch Competition that funds youth-led solutions.
From early struggles to acceleration
The current scale rests on steady growth. Major grants from the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund and the Herman + Rasiej Mathematics Initiative propelled the next leap. “Receiving this award and level of support from such prestigious institutions is an incredible honor,” Ruby said when those grants were announced, emphasizing how the funding would expand programs and transform how young girls view math and science
Ruby does not hide the difficulties. As in-person life resumed, volunteers dwindled and she faced nights of exhaustion and doubt, balancing AP coursework with nonprofit logistics. A formula from Angela Duckworth’s Grit, ‘effort counts twice’ became her mantra. Mentorship sustained her too, especially from Kate McCully, the introverted math teacher from that one-student class who joined the board and guided the fledgling organization through its earliest pivots. “We don’t do anything alone,” Ruby says of the student-run team whose members have matured into polished organizers and communicators.
Ruby Arun guiding students at Warsaw, Poland
A family blueprint for confidence
Ruby often credits her parents for the resolve that keeps her moving forward. Her father’s path, from immigrant student to University of Chicago MBA and global consultant showed her that “hard work is all you need to be successful.” Her mother modeled perseverance of a different kind, working twenty years in corporate roles before launching her own business while raising Ruby and her sister. Their example, she says, taught her that confidence is a skill to be learned, not a trait to be granted. Its a belief she now passes to the children she mentors.
Art, research, and policy in parallel
Even as she leads a global nonprofit, Ruby continues to pursue other demanding interests. She is a two-time published author on service and leadership and a peer-reviewed researcher with studies on math education at Yale and artificial intelligence in electric vehicles at Stanford. At Harvard she also works at the Institute of Politics, researching the targeting of international students. A trained opera and musical theatre singer, she has performed at Carnegie Hall and placed in the top three of international competitions 13 times. These achievements come from a discipline that lends poise to her public speaking and the relentless rehearsal habits that now shape her leadership.
Changing the sound of a classroom
Through every accolade Ruby returns to the same measure of success: the moment a once-fearful child begins to speak math aloud without dread. Parents who once described nightly tantrums now send notes of relief and gratitude. The process echoes that first Zoom classroom, where a solitary student learned that confidence can be cultivated and passed on.
Ruby Arun with few recipients of 2025 Coca-Cola Scholarship
From the kitchen-table sketches of a twelve-year-old to the halls of Harvard and a nonprofit that has touched tens of thousands of lives, Ruby Arun has built a movement on the belief that math can be a language of agency and that teaching confidence, especially to girls who once believed they couldn’t, is as transformative as any equation.
- Follow Ruby Arun on LinkedIn and Instagram
- Learn more about Mission:MathMinds initiatives on its website
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