Nazifa currently attends The Pennsylvania State University where she is enrolled in the College of Engineering program. She is majoring in Mechanical Engineering and minoring in Engineering Leadership Development. She graduated from Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in 2020 with a 4.0 GPA. Nazifa was a part of the DaVinci program, Gateway program, and National Honors Society. In high school, she took various AP courses, such as AP AB Calculus, AP Psychology, AP United States History, and AP Language and Composition. Aside from academics, she was the President of her Robotics team. She also founded the Girl Up club in high school and interned and trained under the Chief Technician of Grove School of Engineering (City College of New York). While in high school, Nazifa was awarded the Dean’s List finalist award for her outstanding leadership and dedication to FIRST Robotics and its mission. She was also awarded the MVP Achievement in recognition of individual excellence, contribution, and achievement during the robotics competition.
Along with robotics, she was also the Senior Chair for NYC FIRST Students Events Coalition, where she hosted different activities, workshops, and events to create opportunities for the robotics teams in NYC to further their technical and soft skills. She was also the Rensselaer FIRST Robotics Scholarship Recipient in 2019 for her outstanding robotics work. Fun fact: Nazifa was a student at Kweller Prep since 10th grade, where she completed the SAT summer course and fall course. After attending the classes, her score improved by 270 points!
Now at Penn State, Nazifa is the Engineering Ambassador for the College of Engineering where she connects with different students and their families, alumni, industry partners, and the community by educating them on the importance of engineering to the health, happiness, and safety of the world and giving presentations and tours on campus. She is also a mentor for the Multicultural Engineering Program where she helps incoming first-year students transition to college better and supports them with their academic and professional life. Furthermore, she is a Maker Ambassador at her college where she hosts events in partnership with the Learning Factory to introduce minority students to machinery and tools available by the College of Engineering. Though she graduated from high school, Nazifa still finds time to help her high school robotics team and mentor them in a virtual setting. Along with academics, she conducts research at her university. She works at the Brite Lab at Penn state as an undergraduate Research Assistant. She assists graduate researchers in studying the impact of psychological safety and cognitive style on engineering design outputs in the classroom and helps to analyze thousands of raw data from students’ outputs during the concept generation stage of the design process. Her course at Penn State includes MATLAB, Statics, Calculus of Several Variables, Matrices, Engineering 408: Leadership Principles, and Engineering 397 Engineering Ambassador.
Nazifa moved to the US when she was only 11 years old. She is the first person in her family not only to major in engineering but also to go to college in the United States. Her extreme determination, courage, and passion for learning helped her navigate through different schools, cultures, and a language. She is fluent in both Bangla and English. She is also familiar with Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu. She knows firsthand what it means to learn and teach difficult materials. That’s why she wants to use her experiences to be able to teach and inspire students and help them navigate through their academic journey. In her spare time, she loves to travel and explore different places, practice photography, hang out with friends, cook, take naps, and play badminton.