Abigail O. Adewunmi Memorial Scholarship

Service was never something I had to be taught. It was just the water I grew up in. From age twelve I worked in my grandmother's medical office in San Jose, watching her care for patients with the same steadiness whether the day was easy or hard. I learned early that showing up consistently for other people is its own form of devotion. That understanding shaped everything that came after, including four years mentoring middle school students at Holy Family School through the Pyrobotics robotics program, regular volunteering at Martha's Kitchen feeding families in our community, and environmental restoration work with Our City Forest. By the time I graduated, I had well over a hundred hours of community service, not because I was counting, but because I was not thinking about stopping. This fall I will enter the Bioengineering program at the University of California, Berkeley, where I plan to focus on surgical instrumentation and medical device design. My goal is to build tools that give surgeons better real-time information during procedures, devices that detect tremor, measure applied force, and reduce the margin for human error in the operating room. That goal did not come from a textbook. It came from years of being close to medicine and close to people who needed it to work. While I am at Berkeley I plan to get involved in engineering pipeline programs for underrepresented students, particularly young Black women who may not yet see themselves in technical fields. I know what it means to walk into a room and wonder if you belong there. I started putting tools directly in the hands of girls who had that look during my robotics mentoring sessions, not asking first, just expecting them to use them. Several of those students went on to compete at regional tournaments. I want to scale that instinct. I want to find the Berkeley equivalents of those Holy Family sixth graders and do the same thing. Post graduation, I want to work on surgical devices that close the gap between the best medical technology available and the communities that need it most but currently cannot access it. The people who build medical tools are not yet representative of all the patients those tools are meant to serve, and that gap shows up in every stage of the design process. I want to spend my career making that gap smaller, both by what I build and by who I bring into the rooms where those decisions get made. Reading about Abby, I kept returning to one phrase: "Miss No Stress." Not because the challenges were not real, but because she understood something I have been learning my whole life. You can carry hard things without being crushed by them. You can move through difficulty with faith and grace and still show up fully for the people around you. My father died when I was in elementary school. My mother has worked two jobs most of my life to keep our family in our home. My grandfather, a veteran with dementia, now lives with us. I know something about carrying things quietly and still moving forward. Abby believed in celebrating the good in life and walking forward with purpose. That is exactly what I intend to do, for her, for the communities I come from, and for the patients who are waiting for tools that actually work.