Nicole Treviño came to Boston from tiny Hidalgo, Texas, where she started a Women in STEM Club at her high school and researched engineering solutions to prevent future catastrophic flooding in the Rio Grande Valley.

Class of 2030

Driven By Her Parents’ Sacrifices and a Passion for STEM, Nicole Treviño Begins Her BU Journey

Mechanical engineering freshman hopes to use her skills to solve real-world problems

This fall, 3,706 freshmen begin their careers at Boston University. The Class of 2030. They hail from 87 countries and 48 states, as well as the District of Columbia. Over the coming weeks, we’ll bring you some of their stories. Today, we introduce you to Nicole Treviño (ENG’30).

Like Nicole Treviño, Hidalgo, Texas—her hometown, population 13,964—boasts a culture that is proudly both American and Mexican. 

“It’s a pretty small town, but it’s very connected,” says Treviño (ENG’30), a mechanical engineering major who has lived in Hidalgo and neighboring Reynosa, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. “You’ve got the elementary school, and right across the street you’ve got the police department, the fire department. Every Fourth of July, they gather and make a parade around the city hall. They decorate with lights and fireworks. And yet it’s also so connected to the Mexican culture; you can go anyplace, and you can talk in Spanish comfortably because everyone there can speak Spanish and English.”

That’s why, when powerful rain storms flooded much of the Rio Grande Valley in 2025, Treviño wanted to do something to help prevent devastation from flooding. With fellow students from the Women in STEM club at her high school, IDEA Los Encinos in McAllen, Texas, she spearheaded a project that imagined new ways to plan for the annual spring rains and better care for impacted communities afterward. Solutions Treviño and her classmates proposed included installing more permeable surfaces in flood-prone areas to manage runoff and mapping communities vulnerable to flooding where additional ditches and catch basins could be built.

“The Rio Grande Valley, throughout most of the year, is pretty much a desert,” Treviño says. “When rain does come, it comes in heavy, and that’s where the city isn’t prepared for that kind of natural disaster. I wanted to do something about it because I knew it could hurt the communities.” 

Treviño has brought her combination of compassion and problem-solving to BU’s College of Engineering. She knew she wanted to attend a university in a city, and she applied to BU sight unseen. She wouldn’t visit campus until May of this year. She based her decision primarily on the reviews of BU from within her community: trusted teachers, classmates, and their relatives who are alumni or currently attend the University. These include a sibling of one of her teachers, a guidance counselor who has helped numerous students get into BU, and a classmate whose sister is a Terrier.

“When we’d get together, [my friend’s sister would] say, ‘Boston University is a really great university where there’s a great alumni network,’” Treviño says. “She told me that I would enjoy a university in the heart of a city.”

Treviño’s journey to Comm Ave began long before she started applying to colleges (which included New York University, the University of Virginia, and Cornell). She was born in South Texas, but her parents returned the family to Reynosa for her early years. Both of her parents have degrees from universities in Mexico, and they’d emphasized the importance of education throughout her life. She recalls her mother leaving the workforce to take care of her and her younger sister and later get them to and from school. Her dad worked in a factory, building engines used in farm equipment. As a child, Treviño loved making art and building with LEGO—both of which allowed her to “put things together to make a whole picture.” 

Compelled to give their daughters the best education possible, the Treviños sent the sisters to live with their grandmother in Hidalgo. 

At the end of each school week, the girls would walk the short distance across the McAllen-Hidalgo International Bridge to spend weekends with their parents in Reynosa. Treviño even remembers visiting her dad at the factory where he worked.

“I was fascinated seeing the machinery, seeing the whole process of creating something, putting it together,” she says. “That’s what really sparked my curiosity for mechanical engineering.”

Treviño is living in Warren Towers with her classmate from Texas, Azuli Silva (ENG’30). She plans to dive into campus life, be it club sports or art, and is excited to meet others who are as passionate as she is about solving real-world problems through engineering. When the path gets hard, she says she’ll remember the sacrifices her parents made to get her to this point. 

“I need to take full advantage of it, and [my parents] are really proud of what I have accomplished,” Treviño says. “They feel that wherever I go, I need to follow what I want, set goals, and accomplish them—even if it’s far from home.”