Can you make it from a rural area? What commuting daily to the best school taught me

I grew up in Moara Vlăsiei, a village in Ilfov, and did high school at "I.L. Caragiale" National College in Bucharest. In my year, I was the only student from a rural area, in one of the most competitive classes in the city. I left home in the dark and lost hours on the road every day, sometimes more, sometimes less. In winter it was night both when I left and when I got back. If you're wondering whether you can "make it" from a rural area — yes, you can. But let me be honest about what it takes.

Background matters. But it doesn't condemn you.

It would be dishonest to say the starting point doesn't matter. My classmates had been taken all over Europe and raised with tutoring several times a week; I came from a modest family that had been through crisis and debt. At first I seriously doubted I could compete. But the real difference between us wasn't intelligence — it was resources and exposure. And resources and exposure can be caught up on: slowly, with work, but they can. Your background gives you a harder start, not a ceiling.

The commute as discipline, not a handicap

Those daily hours on the road looked like wasted time. Over time they became my structure: I would rehearse things in my head, sort out what I had to study, and arrive home knowing exactly what came next. When you have no time to waste, you quickly learn not to waste it. The constraint disciplined me more than comfort ever would have.

What I did differently

I didn't have a complicated recipe. I had a few rules I kept stubbornly:

• I didn't compare myself to their starting point, but to my own from yesterday.
• I turned every disadvantage (the commute, the lack of tutoring) into a reason for discipline, not an excuse.
• I asked for help and I gave help — I learned best by explaining to others.
• I accepted that I'd be behind at first, and that this said nothing about how far I could go.

For today's rural student

I took first prize every year at Caragiale, a 10 in the maths Baccalaureate, and then went on to help dozens of other students — many of them, like me, from disadvantaged families or areas. I don't say this to boast, but because I want the student reading this right now, from the far end of some village, to know one thing: you are in no way lesser. You just have a longer road. And if you walk it with method, you get just as far as anyone. It's precisely to make that road clearer and more accessible that I build the AXS platforms today.