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 (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," […]
Shriya Jonnalagadda (CAS'28) is a third-year studying data science with a minor in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Minor. This summer, as part of the Enlight Fellowship, she built Bottom Line, a model that draws on federal healthcare datasets, a person's health history, financial background, and insurance options to generate what she calls a health credit […]
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 (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 (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 (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 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 […]