From Psychology Major to Founder: Celia’s First Venture
Celia Nocivelli (CAS’26) spent four years as a student athlete at Boston University, and she remembers exactly what it felt like to stand on the sideline waiting to go into a game. Intense anxiety, the kind she had no name for and no one to tell. “I would say there was a lot of times […]
Shreya Sandurkar: Teaching Financial Agency Through Comic Books
Shreya Sandurkar (Questrom’27) remembers exactly what financial independence looked like growing up in India, and what its absence looked like too. “I saw there was a very clear difference in how people who had financial agency and had complete control over their financial decisions behaved versus the people who did not have that choice behaved,” […]
Rachel Selby and the Nature-Based Curriculum for Student Mental Health
Rachel Selby (SSW’27) didn’t set out to build a curriculum. She set out to understand why two problems she kept seeing in young adults, mental health struggles and disconnection from nature, were almost always treated as separate issues. “A lot of young adults, especially in an urban environment like Boston, can also feel very disconnected […]
Zanyah Williams and the Fight for Clean Air and Water in Prisons
Zanyah Williams (SPH ’30) is a second-year PhD student in the Environmental Health program at Boston University School of Public Health, and a member of the 2026 Enlight Fellowship cohort. Her research looks at incarceration as a site of environmental injustice, tracing how people in carceral facilities lose the ability to escape poor air quality, […]
Aman Shankardass’s Boston Cafe Bikers: Group Rides for Safer Streets
Aman Shankardass (ENG’27) was riding to work when he got hit by an SUV outside a hospital in 2024. The driver had waited for the cars to clear, then turned left into the protected bike lane he was in. He kept cycling after the crash, but something had changed. Noise on the street started to […]
Joelle Watanabe’s Civic Engagement Venture is Teaching Hawaii’s Next Voters
Joelle Watanabe (SAR’28) grew up in Hawaii, where she noticed something that stuck with her long before she got to Boston: a lot of young people in her state were not civically engaged. Not uninterested in their communities, just disconnected from the mechanics of how change actually happens. “A lot of people aren’t civically engaged, […]
Naylene Rivera is Building the Mentorship She Needed as a Kid
Naylene Rivera spent the first two months of her life with her father already incarcerated. That fact shaped the next two decades: a childhood navigating a justice-impacted household, and later, a career path aimed squarely at the kids living through the same thing she did. Naylene Rivera (Wheelock’27) is a graduate student at Boston University’s […]
Francisca Altamirano: From Finance to Founder, Building Arora
Francisca Ralil Altamirano (Questrom’27) spent seven years in the investment department of a life insurance company in Chile before she ever thought of herself as a founder. Her work there was technical: evaluating financing for large-scale projects, including the country’s largest geriatric hospital, and leading regulatory reforms in the insurance sector. Nothing about that path […]
Joshua Bonney’s Answer to Ghana’s Graduate Jobs Gap
About 110 students graduate from tertiary institutions in Ghana each year, according to a 2017 report by ISSER, a research organization in Ghana. Only 10 percent find a job within their first year out of school. Joshua Bonney, a second-year Master of Divinity student at BU, read that statistic and recognized himself in it. “And […]
Ignite Change from Year ONE with the First-Year Innovation Fellowship
The First-Year Innovation Fellowship (FYIF) is a semester-long program designed specifically for first-year students at Boston University. Whether you have a fully formed venture idea or just a problem you care about, FYIF provides the coaching, community, and resources to help you turn passion into impact. This year, participating in FYIF gives you a Creativity, […]