Student influencer Dino Ambrosi teaches others how to optimize their tech time
One of the Seven Social Standards that The Social Institute believes in is: Finding Your Influencers. This means surrounding yourself with positive role models who support you and encourage you to play to your core. To help students find these positive and credible influences, we began our Student Influencer Program. Each week we select a different student to take over our Instagram and highlight how they act as a positive influence and inspiration in their communities.
This week, we are excited to introduce Dino Ambrosi. Dino is a senior studying data science at UC Berkeley, but found that transitioning from high school to college was more difficult than he anticipated. Dino found himself repeatedly using his phone and social media to escape stress and anxiety, which later spiraled into an addiction. He realized his addiction was preventing him from reaching his full potential in college and lead to him missing out on countless opportunities. As a result of this, Dino recognized that he needed to make a change. He took a break from school to go work for a startup, and began to rebuild his digital habits. After years of trial and error, Dino finally built a relationship with his devices that allowed him to live a better life. Now, he is on a mission to help his peers do the same. Dino teaches a course at UC Berkeley on building better digital habits to over 60 students who have cut back on their screen time by over two hours per day on average! He also just announced Project Reboot, which is a summer camp for rising high school seniors and college students designed to help them reset their relationship with technology.
Recently, we interviewed Dino to learn more about him and how social media impacts his life. Here is what he had to say:
What do you value about yourself or others?
I value mission-driven work, deep social connections, and quality time in nature alone with my thoughts.
I find that I am only really able to enter into a flow state when I am working on something I am passionate about, and I am always inspired when I see others doing the same. There is nothing I enjoy more than having extended conversations about interesting topics with my friends. I believe that in order to ensure we are on a trajectory we are happy with we need to spend ample time alone with our thoughts. My favorite way to do this is going on backpacking trips where I spend days immersing myself in nature without any distractions.
What are your personal goals?
First and foremost I want to help as many people build healthy relationships with tech as possible. I believe there is a gap in the education system regarding how we interact with our devices and I am eager to fill it by developing a program that guides students to a set of informed intentions for their device usage. Additionally, I want to give them resources and accountability mechanisms to help them stick to those intentions, and teaches them to tap into the tools at their fingertips. Our devices can weigh us down or lift us to new heights – the direction that they push us depends on our ability to engage with them in an informed, intentional manner. I want to make sure my peers are being pushed in the right direction.
Outside of my mission to help others build better digital habits, I want to travel the world, complete an ironman, climb El Capitan, and design and build my own house.
What are the things you try to accomplish each day?
I try to do 3 things everyday:
1. Spend at least one hour working on the most important task I have with no distractions
2. Get outside and exercise in some form or another
3. Meditate for at least 10 minutes
What or who inspires you most?
My grandfather. He recognizes the value of capturing and storing memories. Any time he gets an update about what is happening in my life or we have a noteworthy interaction with each other, he writes a “Poppy Story” summarizing the event with text and photos. Over the course of my life he has written over 1000 stories about myself, my cousins, and his kids. Having my life story recorded in the voice of my grandfather is incredibly special to me and I consider the collection of stories he has written to be the best gift I have ever received.
How has social media acted as a positive influence on your life?
It has enabled me to stay in touch with people that I know from all over the world, and it acts as a “digital scrapbook”. I believe if social media is used with intention it can have a similar effect to what my grandfather’s stories have done for me. Capturing and sharing the moments that comprise our lives is important (in moderation).
Of our Seven Social standards, which one would you most resonate with and why?
Strike a balance for sure. The title of the course I teach at UC Berkeley is Becoming Tech Intentional, and I really believe that “intention” is the key to building a positive relationship with social media. While these platforms can add so much value to our lives, we pay for that value with our time. I think it is critical that we analyze the harms and benefits of social media platforms and come to our own determinations of how much of our time they are worth.
If you could go back and talk to your younger self, what advice would you give to him/her about navigating social media or social relationships?
I would tell myself to optimize for depth over breadth. It is thought that the limit to how many social relationships a human can hold is 150, yet many of us are followed by and following thousands of accounts. Social media platforms benefit from us being overly connected, so they push us to maintain more relationships with fewer, lower quality interactions. We are designed to have highly complex, deep, face-to-face interactions where we communicate via tone, facial expressions, and gestures, and replacing such a rich connection with a like or a comment just doesn’t cut it in my book. As I have progressed through college I have gradually realized that less is more when it comes to my relationships, and I’ve started to spend less time on platforms like Instagram and more time FaceTiming the people that matter to me most.
The Social Institute partners with schools nationwide to empower students, families, and educators to positively navigate their well-being, social media, and technology. Schools access our student-respected, turnkey curriculum through WinAtSocial.com, an interactive, gamified learning platform. With solutions for students, parents, and educators, we offer a systemic and comprehensive social media and student well-being program through a unique and positive approach. We are proud to serve public and independent partners such as Ravenscroft School, Woodward Academy, Oldfields School, All Saints Episcopal School, Lake Forest School District, Boston Public Schools, and more. For more information on how to empower your students to make high-character decisions online and off, please contact us