Ivan Semenenko

I am a sixth-form student taking A-levels in Economics, Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Chemistry. Most of what I do outside those subjects returns to the same question: how an economy behaves once it meets actual people, and what separates an argument that works on paper from one that survives contact with them.

That question is easier to ask honestly if you have tried to build something. In 2024 I founded VRhino, which builds VR fitness software to make sport accessible to more people and has been trading since September 2025, turning over around £5,000 a year. This year I started CourtDesk, booking software for padel clubs, and co-founded BoatXchange, a resale marketplace for rowing boats. Since 2022 I have taught English to Ukrainian refugees displaced by the invasion, and since 2025 I have spent Wednesdays working with children at a local state primary school for special educational needs. None of it is large. All of it has been more instructive than reading about it would have been.

The essays here are the longer version of the same interest, and the rest of the site is the record they are written against: what I have studied, founded, and given time to. Both are set out so they can be checked.

What I am studying

I am in the sixth form at an independent school in the South East (named on request), reading Economics, Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Chemistry at A-level. I sat my GCSEs at another (named on request), taking ten subjects and achieving predominantly grades 9 and 8. Chemistry has gone back for a remark. I took Russian a year early and was awarded a 9.

Outside school I have looked for the parts of economics that a syllabus does not reach. A virtual course at Rice University on the business of economics, with a capstone project, took me through mortgages, the difference between micro and macro, and regional economics, and was the first time I saw how wide the subject is. In August 2026 I attended Yale Young Global Scholars on the Innovations in Science and Technology session.

What I write about

I want to read Economics at university, and the essays are where that interest is worked out at length. They return to one question in different forms: how the rules a society writes down change what its economy actually does.

The cashless society essay is the clearest case. The efficiency argument is strong and the transparency argument is stronger, and neither says anything to the 2.6 billion people without internet access. Working out how much weight that objection can bear is the actual work, and it is what the John Locke Institute shortlisted.

The others follow the same question into different material. One asks why blockchain, decentralised finance and buy now pay later each grew fastest in the years their promoters could argue they fell outside an existing category, which is a question about where economic activity relocates when a boundary is drawn in the wrong place. Another looks at what happens to an economy and a society when the rules themselves give way, taking Weimar between 1930 and 1934 as the case. A fourth, on how new states come into being, I wrote out of interest rather than as part of that enquiry.

What I do

In April 2024 I founded VRhino to improve equality in sport by adapting and building software for it. Since June 2022 I have taught English to Ukrainian refugees displaced by the invasion, and since September 2025 I have spent Wednesdays at a local state primary school working with children with special educational needs. I belong to the Economics Club, where most of these arguments get their first hearing, and spent two years in the Eastern European Society. I play chess, read well past the syllabus, have played for my local football club since 2018 and have been working through the drum grades since 2023.

Work experience and internships

I am looking for work experience or an internship in economics, finance or technology. I have done the virtual programmes, the Stripe one most substantially, and what I want next is a placement with real work in it rather than observation. I write, I build software, and I have run things that had to keep working on a Monday morning. A short placement is as welcome as a long one.

contact@onlyivan.com

How to read this site

The essays are the considered work and carry abstracts. The notes are looser and should be read as thinking in progress. The timeline and the achievements page are the plain record, with dates and credential numbers so they can be checked. My commitments set out what I hold myself to, including how I disclose the use of AI tools.