“I didn’t like doing those sorts of chores,” Edelman says. But he did enjoy fixing his parents’ and neighbors’ computers.

“At some point I made it my business to fix them,” Edelman says.

Around the same time, Edelman also used some of the money from his Bar Mitzvah to start trading stocks, which he soon found he had a knack for. According to the Wall Street Journal, at peak his portfolio was worth $300,000, but he recently sold off his stock to buy a condo near Porter Square.

During his sophomore year of high school, his aunt, the well-known activist and president of the Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman, called him up and asked him to help her organize a huge demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial called Stand for Children.

He organized the group’s computer system and databases, and Stand for Children evolved into an influential child advocacy organization.

“I was their second employee, building this organization from the ground up,” Edelman says.

Directly after high school, even before he moved into the Yard, Edelman spent his summer as an intern at HLS’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He says he spent most of his time as an undergrad north of the College—where he was an economics concentrator in Currier House—at the Berkman Center.

During the winter of his sophomore year, Edelman testified as an expert witness for the first time.

The National Football League (NFL) hired him to investigate the security flaws of a Canadian website from which users downloaded American television.

“It was scary,” Edelman remembers. “I was focused on the scariness and I talked too quietly.”

But the NFL prevailed in a preliminary hearing, and the case was ultimately settled out of court.

The Later Years

Edelman graduated from the College last year, started this year at HLS and has just been accepted as a Ph.D.-candidate in economics at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Despite his move of several blocks, his extracurriculars haven’t changed much.