GoKawiilFor many high school students, summer vacation is a time to unplug. For Ruchira Shree, a rising sophomore at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School South, in New Jersey, the break allows her to ramp up her extracurricular pursuits.
Much of her time is spent assisting with IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section activities. She got involved with the PCJS because of her mother, IEEE Senior Member Shubha Bommalingaiahnapallya, who is the section’s vice chair. Bommalingaiahnapallya is a principal engineer at Intel.
“I started going to the IEEE meetings when I was little,” Shree says. “I used to go with my mom and just sit in the back of the room.”
This summer she says she’s focusing on improving her mathematics skills by attending the Program in Algorithmic and Combinatorial Thinking summer course on math and computer science. She wants to qualify for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, an event for the top American Mathematics Competitions scorers. She earned a place on the AMC 8 honor roll—a recognition awarded to the top 1 percent of participants in the national competition—when she was in seventh grade.
Shree’s IEEE involvement and her advanced math skills caught the attention of an internship recruiter for the Alliance for Indigenous Math Circles, a group dedicated to expanding STEM opportunities for Native American students. The AIMC organizes and sponsors weeklong overnight camps. Interns assist with activities and teach some of the sessions. Shree met a recruiter at one of the section’s events, and she interned at one of the camps last year.
The IEEE-math camp connection
Shree’s involvement with the PCJS evolved naturally as she got older, she says, along the way preparing name badges and tackling similar assignments. She met Francis O’Connell, an IEEE life senior member and founder of FXO, in Plainsboro, N.J. O’Connell is the treasurer of the IEEE Integrated STEM in Education Conference (ISEC).
He has been a mentor to Shree for the past two years, he says.
At last year’s ISEC, she assisted at the registration desk and met Harini Frederickson, an AIMC intern recruiter for New Jersey.
Frederickson invited Shree, along with nine other students, to volunteer at an upcoming camp being held in Santa Fe, N.M.
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