From a young age, Cunningham looked for ways to challenge himself academically. When he heard about the magnet school in his area that taught the rigourous IB Program, the International Academy of Macomb, he knew that was the right place for him. While the program prepared him well for college, the most important takeaway from his high school experience was his development as a thinker. He was taught to think critically, not only looking at what happens in the world around him but also why and how those things happen. He knew that would be an integral tool in both his higher education and his career as an engineer.

High school is also where Cunningham decided to pursue Computer Science as a career. As part of the IB program, students were tasked with choosing a project with only one requirement: it must take one year to complete. Like most kids in Cunningham's generation, he grew up playing video games with his friends. He realized he had no idea what it was like to make a video game, so he chose that to be his project. He spend months learning the basics of game design and programming, with the goal of making a video game based around surviving the IB program. The game included his friends and everyone's favorite teachers as the bosses you had to defeat to graduate. When presenting his project at the expo at the end of the year, the overwhelmingly positive response to his poor drawing suprised Cunningham, and made him realize he could make a future out of that sort of thing. While he doesn't intend to work as a game developer in the future, it is the reason he is pursuing computer science today.

Continuing to pursue a challenging academic experience, he decided to attend the highly esteemed College of Engineering at the University of Michigan. For the first time he is surrounded by people who truly share his passion for learning as well as engineering. So far, his time at college has taught him to take a more conceptual approach to engineering and push his limits as a student. His professors and superiors care more about how much he's learning rather than what his report card looks like. While this was an uncomfortable adjustment at first, it is a welcome one. He has also developed as an adult, with more responsibilities than ever.

In his free time while in school, Cunningham tries to be an active member on campus. In his sophmore year, he join Michigan Hackers, a student organization that where teams work on semester long projects covering topics like interview preparation and machine learning. He also joins the Michigan Data Science Team to get more exposure to Data Science after the University suddenly ended the Computer Science and Data Science Dual Major he intended to pursue when he started college.

Cunningham began his software engineering career as a research assistant at the University of Michigan in the Bioinformatics Lab. His responsibilities included writing scripts for his mentor to use as well as editing research papers his mentor was working on. This was actually Cunningham's first professional experience programming as he was taking his first computer science course at the same time. After his freshman year in 2020, he got a job as a web development intern with Acuitii, a medical tech start up based in Detroit. He contributed to the design of the company's first website launch as well as helped test the mobile app. In 2021, Cunningham held an eight month Software Engineering Internship with Vitesco Technologies, an electric vehicle parts supplier, in Auburn Hills, Michigan. His responsibilities included writing tests for the integration of hardware and software as well as writing scripts to speed up existing processes. In 2022, Cunningham will work as a Software Devlopment Intern with Qualtrics out of their Seattle office.

At this point in his life he doesn't know what his career will look like exactly. He does know that he is actively working to prepare himself for whatever that career turns out to be. In college, he's taught software developement. On his own, he teaches himself web development and interns as a software developer to make himself a well-rounded engineer. He also intends to pursue Data Science and Artificial Inteligence in school as he knows that graduating well-versed in these fields will be an invaluable resource for him as an employee. No matter what shape his future takes, he knows that he will be ready.