Day: October 6, 2025

In 2024, she starred in the movie “Goldilocks and the Two Bears.” At 9 years old, she became a Dj and earned various global awards and recognitions. She does all of this while also excelling in school.

Kleopatra Vargas has starred in several USA fashion weeks including New York Fashion Week, Kids Multicultural World Fashion shows, LA Kids Fashion Week walking for various top designers. Kleopatra is also a cheerleader alongside Student Council President, leading over 200+ kids in her school.

What are some major achievements or accolades that she’s accumulated? 

Kleopatra released her first single at 10 years old. The song is called “THE BOSS.” 

Kleopatra has starred in multiple fashion shows across the USA: New York Fashion Week , Chicago Kids Multicultural Fashion Show, Las Vegas Kids Multicultural Fashion Show, Beautiful You Fashion Show, Utah Fashion Week, Coastal Fashion Show, Kids Fashion Week Network, LA KIDS FASHION WEEK, etc. She has been featured in various press outlets globally and magazine covers including America Kids Multicultural World Magazine, World Class Beauty Queen Magazine, and Kidsfash Magazine. 

Kleopatra has been featured in various American TV and Radio stations : Power 97.5 LA,   ABC 13 – KTNV Las Vegas news, KSNV Channel 3 News , CBS Channel 2 , ABC channel 7 and various international newspapers. 

She also starred in a Hollywood movie titled “Goldilocks and the Two Bears” in 2024. 

She is also an academic, receiving 9 awards in school during the 2024 ceremony, and 5 awards in 2025. Recently, She also became the President of the Student Council in her school. 

Some honors include Best in Music, Best in Social Studies, and Honor Roll 4 years in a row.  

How does she use her platform as an influencer to spread what’s good to the world and who has she impacted? 

Through her social media pages, she entertains people by putting a smile on their faces through her global dance and music choices, also using her comedy skits as a skit to make laugh. A lot of people have sent in various messages thanking Kleopatra for her continuous positivity. She spreads joy through her content creations. On a monthly basis, Kleopatra gives out free meals and groceries to the homeless people alongside her mother, Dr. Krystal Chanchangi, who is a global activist. In 2024, Kleopatra through her mother’s nonprofit, the Dr. Krystal Chanchangi Foundation, and Kids Multicultural Foundation paid 375 kids school tuition in Africa.

Facebook: 

https://www.facebook.com/share/1CZMcT3H9U/?mibextid=wwXIfr 

TikTok: 

https://www.tiktok.com/@kleopatravargas?_t=ZT-903h9BFk28r&_r=1 

Music:

https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/kleopatravargas/the-boss/ 

Instagram: 

https://www.instagram.com/kleopatra_vargas_?igsh=MWg1OGtzbjd5d3Z6dg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr 

YouTube: 

• Girik Malik, 30, is an applied scientist at Amazon Web Services.
• Earning a Ph.D. in AI could take five to six years, Malik told Business Insider.
• But one would still be able to contribute to the fast-moving field even after graduation, he added.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Girik Malik, an applied scientist at Amazon Web Services. The following has been edited for length and clarity. Business Insider has verified his employment and academic history.

When I completed my Ph.D. in AI at Northeastern University in 2023, the AI job market was a world away from the red-hot AI talent war Big Tech companies are waging now.

I secured a job as an applied scientist at Amazon after interning there in the summer of 2022. This was before the company implemented a hiring freeze for the rest of that year.

Today, a top-flight AI researcher with a Ph.D. could see themselves scoring a million-dollar payday from companies like Meta. That said, the road to earning a Ph.D. isn’t easy.

It demands lots of discipline and motivation. In fact, during one of my semesters, I was so caught up with coursework and research that I barely had time to eat. I ended up creating a simple stew and eating it week after week for the entire school term. It was just that hard.

That’s on top of the time taken. A Ph.D. candidate could spend about five years trying to complete it. That time could have been spent gaining practical experience in the working world.

Getting a Ph.D is challenging but rewarding

There’s still a lot of value to be gained from getting a Ph.D. in AI.

Of course, you could try to self-learn about the field through on-the-job training. You might even get to build some products yourself. But if you want to shape the future of AI, you need to do a Ph.D.

Going through the process of getting a Ph.D. will make your learning process a lot more structured and precise. That has become very important now, given how competitive AI research has become.

Just 10 to 15 years ago, a small change or tweak to a model would produce different results that could land you in a prestigious journal or an invitation to a high-level conference. That’s no longer the case.

The bar has become much higher. You need to conduct more experiments, and you need to demonstrate results that generalize well across a wide variety of problems.

It’s not too late to get a Ph.D. in AI

Some believe AI is progressing so rapidly that it may be too late to enter the field through the Ph.D. route. Detractors believe that all the innovations and breakthroughs in AI might be discovered by the time you graduate.

I disagree with that view. A Ph.D. in AI will be just as, if not more, relevant 50 years from now. This is because AI will become ubiquitous in our daily lives. They could be embedded in almost any code we write and the systems around us. You will need more, not fewer, people who can understand and work with AI.

AI systems aren’t perfect. Their algorithms might break in the future, and when that happens, you will need people who understand AI at a fundamental level to come in and fix it. That’s probably going to be someone who holds a Ph.D. in it.

It’s like owning a car. It can be a perfectly nice car, but you will still need to train mechanics to fix it when it breaks down. We didn’t stop teaching mechanical and automotive engineering just because we can make better cars. The same goes for AI.

Industry internships are important

I highly recommend doing internships during the summer breaks in between your Ph.D. studies. This matters even if you intend to stay in academia.

In my case, I did three internships, with the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft, and Amazon. I managed to obtain return offers from Microsoft and Amazon.

The best part about working in the industry is the easy access you get to data and compute.

In a university setting, you are often competing with five to six Ph.D. students to use a computing cluster. And even if you can run your algorithm, it is ultimately based on a limited dataset running on limited hardware. That algorithm may not work if you scale it up.

So take full advantage of those internships. The internships I did forced me to go beyond the textbook and solve complex problems.

One challenge I faced at my first internship at Bosch was getting my neural network to train on a large-scale dataset. For instance, I could have a massive dataset with over 2 million videos. That was at a far larger scale than I was used to at my university.

Dealing with that problem helped give me the skills to solve other infrastructure-related problems I encountered later on in my Ph.D. and my career.

Earning a Ph.D. in AI could open doors for you, but I would caution those pursuing it for the money. If somebody wants to pay you a few million dollars to work at their company, they will screen and filter candidates more aggressively.

If you can sustain that level of motivation for the five to six years it takes to complete your Ph.D., then go for it. I would, however, suggest applying that motivation elsewhere because you could achieve just as much in other areas.

Do you have a story to share about your graduate studies or career in AI? Contact this reporter at ktan@businessinsider.com.

• Alan and Katie Donegan retired early at 35 and 40 — now they’re warning others about common early-retirement mistakes.
• Many people waste money on expensive advisors or risky speculation, slowing their path to financial freedom.
• They say aiming for average returns and avoiding big risks is the smarter way to retire early.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Katie and Alan Donegan, who retired at 35 and 40, respectively. The couple is originally from the UK and has been nomadic since 2020. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.

Alan: Katie and I retired in 2019 and have been running financial independence workshops around the world since. One of our biggest time commitments is a free 10-week course that we run each year as we travel, teaching people the basics of saving and investing.

Katie: When you’re on your journey to financial independence and early retirement, there are all these booby traps. Some are set up by companies, and some by society.

Here are five traps we’ve fallen into ourselves or continue to see people fall for all the time.

1. Hiring professional advisors

Katie: One common mistake people fall into is not making investment decisions themselves. This comes from a fear of getting it wrong and thinking, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

Instead of learning, they just hire professional advisors, which they don’t need. It’s a double whammy because these advisors charge high fees and also put your money into overly conservative investments like bonds alone.

Alan: Even a 1% fee paid to a professional can add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means delaying your financial independence. Katie originally invested with a very high-fee advisor. We worked it out later and realized that if we hadn’t switched to low-cost index funds, we would be over a million British pounds worse off.

2. Speculating instead of investing

Alan: A lot of people confuse speculation with investing. Investing is buying an asset that creates a return, such as a rental property or a stock from a business that is trading.

Speculation is buying something with the hopes that you can sell it for more later. There is a big trend of buying whiskeys, or people going crazy about buying Lego. They just pray that prices go up but some of these items cost money to store and look after. So it really is a gamble.

If you buy Apple stock, there are thousands of employees, stores everywhere, and people buying and producing the phones. You’ve got a trading business, whereas whiskey does nothing.

3. Trying to time the market

Katie: People say things like, “The stock market is too high, I’m scared to invest. The stock market is too low, I’m scared to invest.” People will take anything that is happening and use it as a reason to time the market and procrastinate their investing.

Alan: This means your money doesn’t get invested, and in general, you lose out if your money’s not invested. People read headlines about market crashes and forget that there will still be trading companies that will still make money, because people still need to buy things like vegetables.

Katie: There’s a phrase that goes “time in the market is better than timing the market.” Of course, there’s going to be lucky moments where you could have timed it differently, but you can’t know that.

4. Not knowing how to wait

Katie: Investing is not entertainment. Once you have found your index funds and automated your investments, go to the cinema, go out, and live your life.

In the financial independence community, it’s called the boring middle, where the work is done, and the only thing left to do is wait. This is when people are tempted to check their portfolios constantly and lose sleep.

But the boring middle is when you do the fun stuff — working on your health and your happiness so that when you do have that financial freedom, you’re a well-adjusted, healthy human who can do something useful with all your free time.

5. Chasing outperformance

Alan: Many people tell us that investing in an index fund yields average returns. We say average returns are amazing because they’re actually better than 90% of other investments.

But people don’t like getting average returns or don’t want to be average people. So they run after outperformance, chase all these terms like alpha and beta, and get really into picking stocks, which in general always leads to underperformance. So, for us, we keep repeating, “average is extraordinary.”

Katie: This is more common among people who discover financial independence in their 40s or 50s. They try to make up for lost time by making huge, risky investments like meme stocks, crypto, or other crazy investments that they think will produce outsize returns.

He howls every time it comes on 😔

Professor Rachel Van Cleave of the McGeorge School of Law joined KCRA 3 on Monday to address some of the legal questions surrounding the deployment of the National Guard.