My Background

Growing up in Voorhees, New Jersey, I graduated from Eastern High School in 2015 as valedictorian, and headed off to the University of Pennsylvania to pursue engineering. It was at Penn that I won Card’s Against Humanity’s inaugural Science Ambassador Scholarship, as the sole winner of 1,000 female applicants to win the award. This ambassadorship led me onto a path to work for improvement of education both in and outside of Penn.

At Penn, I became a board member for Advancing Women in Engineering and the Penn Materials Science and Engineering Society. As board member in both groups, I organized events designed to benefit students’ personal and professional lives and communicated with faculty and administration on ways to improve student education. In addition, I joined Moelis Access Science, where I taught physics, chemistry, and general science to West Philadelphia students lacking access to quality STEM education. I also became a teaching assistant for three different courses, and in two of them (Intro to Engineering and Engineering Entrepreneurship), I was regularly grading up to 50 student essays for clarity, content, structure, and more.

As part of my role as Science Ambassador, I also introduced engineering, STEM activism, and other topics to students and adults through speaking engagements. This included speaking to high school Society of Women Engineers clubs, entrepreneurship conferences, and to Penn Alumni through the Our Penn Philadelphia event, where I commiserated on STEM education with the President of UPenn, Amy Gutmann.

In total, my experiences have given me immense insight into education and have honed my communication skills, so that I can effectively express myself when speaking or writing. These allow me to tackle all sorts of applications with ease and help me understand what interviewers are looking for, whether for scholarships, college admissions, or employment. These insights and skills helped me be admitted to my current master’s program and win the Thouron Award. Now, I want to use them to help other students get into their dream schools and achieve their greatest potential.

Aside from the activities above, I was also captain of my dance team, Penn Raas, a research assistant in the Composto and Raney labs, an intern at the AR-tech company Magic Leap, an English teaching assistant while studying abroad, student ambassador for the Rothberg Catalyzer, and director for the South Jersey collegiate dance competition, Dhamaka Tamasha.