Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class in my Departmental Honors experience was LING 441: Language Processing & Development. This is that class that started me on my research journey, taught by the professor who became my research mentor! While I already knew I wanted to study Linguistics, this class specifically sparked my interest in language development and has been incredibly foundational in my education as a prospective speech-language pathologist.

Favorite Honors Experience: My favorite experience outside of class during Departmental Honors was attending the Society for Research in Child Development conference with my research advisor and a PhD student from my lab. It was incredible to see the massive community our research is a part of and to hear talks from other researchers. It was especially meaningful as I got to briefly meet a researcher who is also in the career I plan to pursue, and talk to her about her journey to research. This gave me ideas for what my future could and might look like! Overall, it was so inspiring to learn from so many knowledgeable researchers and see how broad my field is!

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class during my Departmental Honors experience was BIOEN 481: Engineering Cell Biology at the University of Washington, taught by Professor Hongxia Fu. For the class, I completed a research report exploring a gap in the field related to biomaterials that reduce clotting in blood-contacting devices.

Favorite Honors Experience: My favorite non-class experience was hanging out with my classmates, who became some of my closest friends throughout the program.

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class in my Departmental Honors experience was BIOEN 463: Optogenetics. The course brought together concepts from both of my majors, Neuroscience and Bioengineering, and showed me how interdisciplinary approaches can drive innovation in science.

Favorite Honors Class: Engineering Cell Biology, because we learned about the latest advances in cell engineering

Favorite Honors Experience: Presenting my research at the Bioengineering Capstone showcase

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class was BIOEN 327, a materials and fluids lab where we had an end of course group project. It was a wonderful mix of learning and applying what we learned.

Favorite Honors Experience: I loved all the people I met and got to work with. Being involved in so many projects allowed me to build great relationships with my peers. I especially loved my capstone experience with my group. We worked together and communicated nearly every day, but it was always an enjoyable experience and felt more like spending time with friends than working.

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class was FIN 499: Finance Independent Study under Professor Doron. After taking his M&A course, I built a financial model for an acquisition target for Amgen, a company I was interviewing for at the time. I talked about my model during the interview and landed the role! That experience made me want to go deeper, so I pursued ad hoc honors research comparing a self-built LBO model against one generated by AI.

Favorite Honors Experience: My favorite non-class experience was a leadership simulation with fellow Business Honors students. We were put into a management team and had to make real business decisions under time pressure, reacting to crisis after crisis the way an actual airline leadership team would. What made it special was that there was no clean right answer. Every decision involved trade-offs across customer satisfaction, employee morale, shareholder returns, and budget, all at once. It pushed me to think beyond just the numbers and actually practice leading and collaborating with people who approached problems completely differently than I did. That kind of messy, high-stakes, collaborative experience is something you just don't get sitting in a lecture hall, and it stuck with me more than I expected.

Favorite Honors Class: One of the most rewarding experiences was my capstone course, where I worked on a project researching the peamouth, a common but understudied fish species native to Lake Washington. With two of my peers, we worked with a member of the Muckleshoot Tribe and interviewed local community members to learn the ecological and cultural significance of the species. We wrote an article and created educational materials about the peamouth using all of our research.

Favorite Honors Experience: I had the opportunity to be the Music Director for Hounds of Music A Cappella, an RSO on campus dedicated to singing and music. As an RSO, we were able to raise money for Seattle Children's Hospital through door-to-door caroling, perform on campus and at local businesses, and make great friends. During my four years with Hounds, I have gained many leadership and interpersonal skills that I will carry forward into my career.

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class was AA/ME/EE 585: Learning-Based Control. What was pretty eye-opening about the class was when we learned about policy gradients, where instead of trying to get a value to converge to an optimum while subject to a specific cost function, you iterate on the parameters that inform a policy instead. It's one of the main facets that differentiates reinforcement learning from classical machine learning.

Favorite Honors Experience: I had the opportunity to conduct research on a rudderless, rotary-tail configuration for small-scale aircraft, similar to how vultures rotate their tails to control flight. This is useful for reducing drag, thus making the aircraft more fuel- and aerodynamically efficient. In particular, I investigated the deviations in conventional take-off flight trajectories when using this alternative configuration, aiming not to excite the non-minimum phase internal dynamics that could cause the system to go unstable while using our feedforward controller design. I'm thankful for Profs. Mesbahi and Dabiri within the A&A department for giving me this opportunity, and I hope to move this research forward while studying Aviation and Aerospace Sustainability at Embry-Riddle!

Favorite Honors Class: JSIS 492 was my favorite departmental honors class. During this course, I worked closely with my mentor to collect and analyze my data and write my final thesis. This process was incredibly challenging, but I learned how to be self-disciplined in my research and became a better researcher. I am so grateful for everything I learned in JSIS 492.

Favorite Honors Experience: My favorite experience outside of class was the time I spent reading in the library. When most students talk about research, they picture themselves in a lab, but I found myself roaming through the stacks in Odegaard and Suzzallo libraries looking for certain authors or very specific topics to help me understand and draw meaning from my data. For several weeks, I carried fifteen or twenty books around, in addition to my textbooks and notebooks, as I read more and more to broaden my understanding of current academic arguments in order to figure out where my own ideas stood in relation. The day I returned all 35 books I had checked out was the most bittersweet day of my program.

Favorite Honors Class: I absolutely loved learning about international energy security (JSIS 458). It's not technically in ESRM, but it has been one of my favorite classes. Honors gives a lot of flexibility to take courses outside of your direct curriculum, so I'd highly recommend branching out and exploring!

Favorite Honors Class: Environmental Law and Policy

Favorite Honors Experience: Writing and publishing an article on Agewise King County, titled "Think Globally, Act Locally: An Older Adult's Guide to Environmental Sustainability in Seattle and King County."

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class was the independent study portion of my Departmental Honors program. In this class, I conducted a self-led Honors thesis project, investigating a topic of interest to me, in close partnership with a staff mentor. This class was an incredible opportunity to undertake such a great task with one-of-a-kind guidance from a professor.

Favorite Honors Experience: My favorite non-class experience was the community that the Departmental Honors program cultivated. Within our Honors cohort, we all became great friends, despite working on separate, individual projects. It was amazing to be able to work alongside such interesting and hardworking peers, in both an academic setting, as well as outside of our class meeting times.

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class in my Honors experience was MELC 101. Although I grew up in Dubai, this course helped me engage more deeply with the "Middle East's" history in a way I hadn't before. The guest lectures were quite impactful and offered a breadth of perspectives that expanded my understanding. This class also encouraged me to continue exploring "Middle Eastern" studies further, through more challenging coursework, and even beyond the classroom.

Favorite Honors Experience: My favorite non-class experience has been my research in the Grannan Lab, where we're working to study rhythm processing in the Globus Pallidus internus of patients with Parkinson's disease. This work feels especially profound because Parkinson's has affected my own family, and it has given me a way to connect my academic interests to something meaningful in my life. I still remember how intimidated I felt at first, but over time I grew into a more active role, developing code to present auditory stimuli and analyze intraoperative recordings. What I value most about this experience is the shift in how I see myself: as someone who can contribute to research that may one day improve patients' lives.

Favorite Honors Class: My favorite class was NURS 445, in which we met to discuss our project goals and progress, which helped me stay on track and create fun memories.

Favorite Honors Experience: I was able to work and meet with other students from all over the nursing programs and talk to them about their courses and life experiences, which was memorable.

Favorite Honors Class: While my Introduction to VLSI course may exist in my mind as countless late nights, it also has some of my favorite memories. So many times, when I was exhausted and didn't want to work, I would meet up with my friends in that class, and we would persevere. Even if it took us singing Disney showtunes while getting work done until 3 in the morning to finish a project, we made it through.

Favorite Honors Experience: My honors research experience was one of my favorite moments in my honors experience. Working with my research partner, we pioneered, developed, and crafted a model camera scanning prototype that I am proud to say I built. While we may have had to start off from scratch (more than a few times...) and failed at nearly every turn, we enjoyed the work that we were doing and learnt from our failures. Going into the real world, I'm happy to have had this experience, to know what it means to fail at nearly every level, and yet persevere and come through with a feasible product at the end.