Lucio Hightower-Rojas Wants to Solve Students’ Scholarship Struggles

As a high school senior, Lucio Hightower-Rojas (pictured above) is no stranger to tests, quizzes, essays and research. After all, he’s spent countless hours in his Los Angeles, California, high school putting quality time into all of the work. But when he began a year or so ago to search for scholarships to help him pay for college, he was kind of blown away by the time commitment and difficulty of navigating the process. And so was born Scholar Brilliance, the software business that he is launching with the help of his older brother and his mom to provide guidance and AI support to students seeking scholarship money for college. “We believe every student deserves a chance to achieve their academic dreams without the burden of debt,” says Lucio, who won the 2024 Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship National Entrepreneurship Challenge.

Wharton Global Youth caught up with Lucio a few months before graduation to learn more about Scholar Brilliance and his path toward future business leadership.

Be sure to click on the arrow above to listen to our podcast conversation. An edited transcript appears below.

Wharton Global Youth: Hello and welcome to Future of the Business World. I’m Diana Drake, managing editor of the Wharton Global Youth Program at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Each month on this podcast, I get to speak with innovative high school students from around the world. We share stories of entrepreneurship, grit, failure and discovery. It’s an exploration of the entrepreneurial mindset, and we always take away insights about business, people and purpose.

Today’s guest began building his problem-solving skills a few years back with the help of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Assignments turned into a business idea, which led him deeper into the life of an entrepreneur.

Lucio Hightower-Rojas, welcome to Future of the Business World.

Lucio Hightower-Rojas: Thank you for having me, Diana.

Wharton Global Youth: Tell us about yourself. Where do you live and where do you go to school? I’ve also seen you described as a Los Angeles Urban League student. Can you tell us more about that?

Lucio: Yes. I live in northeast Los Angeles in a neighborhood called Eagle Rock and I’m going to school at Eagle Rock High School. It’s my senior year, so I’m graduating in June. Very excited for that. The Los Angeles Urban League was the program that first introduced me to entrepreneurship in Los Angeles. They taught me a lot about how to find business opportunities, how to do financials, how to pitch for businesses, and how to understand how businesses work under the hood.

Wharton Global Youth: Another description for you that I’ve often heard is that you’re a sharp entrepreneur. Let’s explore what that looks like. Our friends at the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship let us know that you were named the winner of their 2024 National Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge in October of last year. Congratulations on that big honor. The business you pitched to the judges is called Scholar Brilliance, an AI-driven platform that helps students improve their successes in the scholarship application process. Can you tell us more about Scholar Brilliance? What it is and how it works?

To clarify, a scholarship is financial support awarded to a student by governments, schools, or private organizations that’s based on academic achievement or financial need.

Lucio: Scholar Brilliance is a software I’m developing that’s main purpose is to help students find, apply to and then win scholarships. And right now, we’re focusing mainly on making it an AI coach that helps you find scholarships based on your interests, what grade levels you are in, and your grades. Then it also helps coach you through how to apply to the different scholarships, how to write the essays, and overall, just support to help you with scholarships. And that’s the main software element we’re building right now to help students with the application process.

Wharton Global Youth: When you say we, who do you mean?

Lucio: I’m building it a bit. I’m also working with my older brother, who’s a computer science major at UC (University of California) Santa Cruz, and he’s helping me a lot with coding and some of the technical stuff that I’m not completely familiar with. Then my mother is also helping me with some of the business stuff on it, and also some of the coding, as well. So, my brother, my mother and I are all focusing on building this software.

Wharton Global Youth: Lucio, you’re a senior in high school, and you’re no doubt familiar with the scholarship process. Can you talk about how your own experience helped to inform your entrepreneurial mindset around Scholar Brilliance? When did you realize students could use more guidance? What was it like with your process?

Lucio: About the fall of junior year in high school, as I was going through the process of applying for scholarships, I realized it was a lot more difficult than I thought it was originally. I was trying to find scholarships that were a lot smaller and hidden on the internet and trying to find those through different local community organizations and different schools. And then having to write a bunch of different essays, which is a whole thing on top of my current schoolwork. It was very difficult to have to research the organization, then write essays that would match what they were looking for. As I was going through that process of spending almost all Saturday and Sunday after I finished my schoolwork working on scholarships, I realized this must be a large problem for a lot of people, and this could be a great business I could start and pioneer to help students like me with the cost of college.

Wharton Global Youth: I really want to hear more about the students like you. Can you share some of your experiences that you’ve had with other high school students? Maybe you were gathering research for Scholar Brilliance to better understand the market? What have you learned about the human side of your product development?

Lucio: I’ve spoken to a lot of my friends and my older brother’s friends who he’s in college with, and a lot of it’s just trying to make it as easy and simple as possible, because a lot of students like myself, my brother, are doing a bunch of homework and essays and practice preparing for tests for school, and then having to focus on a whole new thing that’s completely foreign, which is scholarships. And there’s not really any training or any help when it comes to scholarships at most schools or public schools where I’m from. So, helping [students] learn the entire new skill set and idea behind scholarships is something I found is a large problem with a lot of students right now. [We need to educate] them on how it works. And [we want to show them] that there is hope for that future — paying for college with scholarships. The second thing is showing them how their current college essays and job applications can be transformed into scholarship essays by just tweaking a couple things, so it seems less overwhelming. Another large thing was the overwhelm that students had when it came to applying for scholarships and writing essays for them and all that extra work they felt like they had to do.

Wharton Global Youth: It sounds like all this research that you were doing validated the idea for Scholar Brilliance. Would you agree with that?

Lucio: Yeah. I I first thought it was a large problem when I was in NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship) and they were talking about how to find problems. But then when I spoke to all my friends and my brother, I realized it was much larger and much more difficult than I originally thought it was. It would be a great business opportunity to go and help solve that massive problem for a lot of students.

Wharton Global Youth: Have you reached the point of your prototype and product development with this that students are using a platform and able to benefit from the guidance that you’re providing through Scholar Brilliance?

Lucio: We have a prototype set up on our website right now, scholarbrilliance.ai, and it’s free. We’re getting feedback from our students and our users on what they like about it, and what we need to improve. We’re also focusing on the AI side of it more data on past winning essays so it can coach students better in the future. We are [monitoring] our user experience and our success with the platform and trying to get both of those metrics. [We hope to] improve them over the next couple of months so we can eventually launch fully and help students with scholarships consistently and successfully.

Wharton Global Youth: As the winner of the Youth Entrepreneurship Challenge, you won $10,000 and a 45-minute mentorship session with Daymond John. For those who don’t know, he’s the founder and CEO of FUBU, which is a $6 billion Hip Hop apparel company, and he’s also a shark on the TV show, Shark Tank. So Lucio, what was it like to meet Daymond John? What did the two of you talk about?

Lucio: It was a crazy experience. I’m super grateful for it, and it was also shocking and hard to even believe what was happening. But it was a great experience. I learned a lot. [One] of the things we talked about was: how do startups find opportunities? A big thing was how to test different ideas. So, for Scholar, I had a couple different ideas when it came to developing the software, and it was figuring out how I should test those without spending too much money — where it put all my eggs in one basket. But also putting enough effort into it, so I could have a good idea if it was worth it and if the market would appreciate that new idea. It was about understanding what your market wants and how you can make that and fulfill that desire with a product and testing out that product-market fit. That was a large component of [our mentoring session]. He was telling me that you should focus on testing with a lot of work and talking to customers directly. Then once you have that solid base of knowing exactly what they want, then you can put more money behind it and launch a test product and see how people interact with a real product.

Wharton Global Youth: So, you took away a lot of business lessons from it, but tell me about him. I want to know more about him! I want to know about the People’s Shark. Was he a nice guy? And did you guys meet in a restaurant, or did you meet in his office? What was it like?

Lucio: Yeah, he was great to talk to. He was very positive. And he was definitely the People’s Shark. We met on a Zoom conference. And over that Zoom conference, we simply talked about [business], and I took notes during the conference. It was very good to talk to him. He was very friendly, very open, and helped me a lot. He wasn’t judgmental, just helping me along like a mentor, and it was a very helpful and positive experience overall.

Wharton Global Youth: All right, so we talked about Daymond. So, how about that $10,000 [you won]? Are you investing it back into your business? And tell me more about the future of Scholar Brilliance after high school. Do you hope with your brother to keep making this a reality?

Lucio:  For the $10,000 side of it, I’ve invested some of it in learning more and improving my coding and AI skills, as that’s one of the biggest things — how to make the software behind it a lot better. [I’m looking into] AI and coding courses and figuring out how that works. My brother also is helping me with that side as well. [I’m] also investing and figuring out more about the software side of it and I saved a bit of it for college as well. I’m also saving a bit for how we can create a backend for the entire system, so it can store a bunch of user information and have accounts — all that back-end work and software.

For the future of Scholar Brilliance, I see this becoming a full product that’s a full software that we can give to schools and sell differently to students, as well.

Wharton Global Youth: I suppose as the developer and founder of Scholar Brilliance, you are its first user, right? I’d love to know where you are going to college, and if it has helped you through the process — learning all of this about the scholarships and essay writing and all of it. What’s next for you?

Lucio: I’m going to college for business at UC Berkeley, here locally in California, and I have used my own product for applying to scholarships. I have $20,000 so far in scholarship money, and then I also plan on [using it to help me] with college application essays, which is another side feature you can use it for. Personally, I’m going to study business at UC Berkeley, and then focus more on learning how to share more of the stuff I don’t know about business, the more in-depth, advanced things, and taking that to Scholar Brilliance.  And then eventually, [I want to] take that to the next level by putting a full product software company behind this.

Wharton Global Youth: How has your entrepreneurship journey empowered you in different ways? Did you confront any struggles along the way, and do you feel maybe they also helped you to grow?

Lucio:  It has been a bit challenging with the competition side of it. And the coding side definitely was a big thing — I was not used to coding and software and product development. So that was a big hassle of figuring out how to learn all this information so fast that you could have an actual prototype by the NFTE [Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship] National Competition in November, and that was a big push. One of the main things I learned was how to use my time and prioritize my tasks so I could learn and get things done a lot faster, especially when I had such a tight deadline between November and October. So, that was a big lesson for me: how to manage time and how to get things done efficiently. That was a very large growing moment for me.

Also, with the whole NFTE competition, being able to speak on stage to a lot of people was something I had to work on. You progress in different competitions — locally, regionally and nationally. So, I had some experience with that in the past. But I became more comfortable talking on stage to a lot of people and slowing my words down. Being more confident on stage was something that I had to develop, and that’s helped me a lot over time, as well.

Wharton Global Youth: Let’s end with our lightning-round questions. Please answer these as quickly as you can.

What is something about you that would surprise us?

Lucio: I run marathons. I’ve run six LA marathons so far.

Wharton Global Youth: What would you like people to know about your hometown of LA?

Lucio: It’s a lot friendlier, and it’s a lot nicer, and actually gets cold here sometimes as well. It’s not always warm.

Wharton Global Youth: One thing you are excited to learn that you don’t yet know?

Lucio: I’d like to learn a lot more about business financials and accounting. And all that fun stuff.

Wharton Global Youth: What is a brand that you use and appreciate?

Lucio: I use a lot of Nike gear when it comes to running and working out. So probably my most used brand is Nike.

Wharton Global Youth: When was the last time you did something for the first time?

Lucio: Ice skating with my sister on my sister’s birthday, about three or four months ago.

Wharton Global Youth: How’d it go?

Lucio: It was good. I fell a lot on the ice, and it was a bit embarrassing, but I eventually learned how to get the hang of it. So that was good.

Wharton Global Youth: You’re hosting your own business-themed talk show. Who is your first guest and what is your first question?

Lucio: My first guest would be Mark Zuckerberg, and I’d ask him how he found his first investors for the company.

Wharton Global Youth: Lucio Hightower-Rojas, thank you for joining us on Future of the Business World.

Lucio: Thank you for having me.

Conversation Starters

What financial barriers do you see preventing students from accessing higher education, and how might technology help overcome them?

If you could design an AI tool to solve a problem you’ve experienced in school, what would it be and why?

Help Lucio do his research. What pain points and positives have you personally experienced with the scholarship search and application process? Share your ideas in the comment section of this article.

Hero cover image photographed by: Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE.com)