Hi, everyone! My name is Samhita Vasu. I was born in central Massachusetts and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in California when I was 9 years old. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, with a degree in Biomedical Engineering, and I am now in Chennai, India on a Fulbright Scholarship until May.
My interest in engineering began in middle school, when my geometry teacher played a 1994 interview of Steve Jobs for the class. His words from this interview have stayed with me to this day: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you.” Once I stopped placing problems on a pedestal, I realized I, like everyone else, could shape the world around me into one I envisioned.
I decided to major in specifically biomedical engineering because I was interested in applying engineering to medicine. When I was eight years old, my grandmother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Over time, as she underwent a series of treatments, I watched as she lost her mobility, independence and ultimately her cognitive capacity. Because of her health problems, my grandmother has difficulty saying when she feels pain.
