My name is Sunnia Khan. I was born in North Carolina, but my parents are from Pakistan. I am an American muslim, and the experiences I’ve made in the muslim community are memories I will never forget. There are Eid festivals (a religious holiday for muslims) where I’ve made many good friends, parties and social events with endless laughter at our mosque, and many opportunities that I got to participate in, such as the Muslim Inter-Scholastic Tournament (MIST), this past year for math.
I have always loved math and science (math a little more). In middle and high school, I never really liked English or history, but have always found myself eager to go to my next math/science class, so I can learn more about either stoichiometry and circuits, or probability and integrals. My dad has definitely had a huge influence over my love for math. He would make me do math workbooks in the summer to further develop my skill for math, and instead of hating the subject, I fell in love with it. I even got a job at Mathnasium, a math tutoring center, during high school, and I still work there. He is also an electrical engineer, and introduced me to the engineering, the major I picked! I became a STEM scholar so I can further explore different careers that involve STEM, as well as other engineering disciplines.
My major is biomedical engineering right now, since I have always wanted a job that included the medical field (and can help people), but I still want to explore to see if there are any other careers that might fit my interests. Up to this point, I was in Future Medical Careers Club in my high school, where different kinds of doctors (surgeons, pharmacists, radiologists) came in and talked about what their average day would look like. I also participated in a Health Camp through Ohio University my sophomore year, where I got to practice CPR and stethoscope techniques on dummies, and where I got to see my first cadaver. Lastly, my best friend’s dad who is a pulmonologist, let me scrub in on a surgery he did, where he needed to clean up all the smoke and mucus built up in a poor old man’s lungs. Then, we got to experience rounds with him, where he talked to other types of doctors and made a game plan for each patient they visited.
To gain more hands-on/real-world skills, I will start to join more organizations to learn more about engineering and to participate in engineering projects around campus. For example, I joined Engineering of Community Service, so I can gain community service hours by building meaningful inventions for people who could really benefit from them. Also, I plan on going to more meetings that the Stem EE Scholars program provides, to learn more about biomedical engineering.