Nadia became fascinated by engineering soon after her family moved to the United States from her native Bolivia nine years ago. “I spent three summers during high school studying it through a non-profit organization called The Center for the Advancement of Hispanics in Science and Engineering Education, which taught college-level courses to aspiring engineering students, regardless of their ability to pay,” she says. “I think that organization had a tremendous impact on me.”
At Cornell, Nadia gives some of that gift back in her role as director of corporate affairs for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, raising $10,000 to help send engineering students to conferences.
She explains that the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell is relatively new, born out of the fast-growing demands of the biomedical field. “Right now I’m doing research with a biomed grad student in fluid mechanics,” she says. “We’re trying to create a pump on a micro level; the channel through which liquid would pass is only 100 micrometers. We’re trying to make the system very simple but not bulky.”
Nadia hopes to become a professor. “This past summer I did an internship in virology and loved it. That could lead to an M.D./Ph.D. program, but before that I want to work for a while, maybe at the N.I.H.,” she says. “I want to make sure that research is a life that will suit me.”
She describes the atmosphere at Cornell as competitive, but friendly. “There is cooperation between students and between departments,” she says. “At this point, most new engineering problems have a sort of global reach to them, and many fields are willing to work together—mechanical engineering is constantly cooperating with electrical engineering, for example. At the same time, each individual needs to know a lot about the different fields.
“This, in fact, is my biggest realization lately about my education at Cornell,” she continues. “What I realized is that although the requirements in the first two years here appear very general—chemistry, physics, etc.—now that I’m doing research I’m so grateful I took chemistry! You really do need all those core classes Cornell requires you to take!”
