2025
Over the summer, I changed my major from Economics & Business Administration to Electrical Engineering while maintaining a Business Administration minor to preserve my business foundation. As a result, this semester’s courses were more challenging than last year's, and I have so far enjoyed studying in this new field. During the summer leading into sophomore year, I was busy with my job on-island and also held a remote internship on a team working with a doctor at NASA, improving accessibility to NASA's annual State-of-the-Art Small Satellite Report for universities, startups, and government partners. I also conducted research for my London economics professor, analyzing how U.S.-initiated trade wars affected global trade patterns and environmental outcomes across every country worldwide. My sophomore fall was my first semester in Boston after spending my previous year abroad in Oakland and London. Transitioning from a cohort of 800 students to Northeastern's city campus of 17,000 undergraduates was exciting and opened up new opportunities I hadn't previously experienced. This fall semester, I was admitted to the John Martinson Honors Program at Northeastern, which offers exclusive classes and career development opportunities. I joined a couple of engineering clubs on campus, including Forge, a product development club where I worked on a software team to build a roommate coordination web application called HomeBase. I also joined the Engineers Without Borders Uganda Program, where we’re designing and building water tanks for local villages. Looking ahead, I’m beginning to search for co-ops to apply for during the spring semester. I am also building a personal website as a side project and planning an electrical engineering project to develop in Northeastern's makerspace early next semester.
2024
I had a great time in the Bay Area for my first semester at Northeastern’s Oakland campus! I enjoyed my classes (Financial Accounting & Reporting, First-Year Writing, Introduction to Marketing, and Principles of Microeconomics) and learned a lot in and out of the classroom.I also enrolled in a one-credit course called Global Learning Experience, which was unique to the Bay Area. While the number of extracurricular activities was limited on the Oakland campus, I was able to attend speaker events such as the Tuesday Speaker Series for the Entrepreneurship Club (E-Club) and the Disrupt Speaker Series, which was for the FinTech club. Lastly, I participated in NU Oakland’s Husky Startup Challenge, in which I developed a product idea and created a slideshow covering everything from the problem the product solves to its business model. My product was an app that locates the nearest water refill stations on a map, which would decrease the amount of plastic waste used and save consumers money. Unique to Northeastern’s Oakland Campus were Experiential Treks (E-Treks), in which we each visited a nearby business headquarters in a group, ranging from Google to a local bagel bakery. I went to the Intuit headquarters in Mountain View and learned how different departments must come together to develop a product. My favorite part of being in Oakland was going into San Francisco. I went on an excursion to Alcatraz, which was cool to see and learn about the island's history. The restaurants we went to were amazing, and the distinctiveness of the neighborhoods is what made San Francisco a very fun city. My favorite singular trip off campus, however, was to Lake Tahoe. The scenery was amazing, and fortunately, it was warm enough for me to go for a short swim. Overall, I had a great first semester in Oakland. I had the perfect balance of learning in school, narrowing down what I want to do for my career, and having fun exploring the West Coast. Now that I am in London, I am even more excited to see what this city has to offer and travel to other places in Europe!