Melissa A.

While serving as her father's apprentice during car and appliance repairs, Melissa discovered her passion for engineering. This curiosity grew into a drive to create solutions to improve the world around her. Her friend’s near-accident motivated her first engineering project, a drowsy driving detection system embedded in a steering wheel cover. Later, she developed an auto-stabilizing cup for individuals with Parkinson’s. Both projects earned national awards at SkillsUSA engineering competitions. Melissa deepened her expertise through a machine learning internship at NASA’s Planetary Science Division, where she worked on a project supporting NASA’s Discovery and New Frontiers missions. Additionally, she participated in the MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science program, where she created a computational model to predict femicide seriality and presented her findings at the MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference. Driven to share her passion and give back to her home country, Melissa founded TechnoChicos, a program introducing Nicaraguan children to programming and computer-aided design. Within the United States, she represented over twenty-two thousand SkillsUSA Texas members as a State Officer and lobbied on Capitol Hill for STEM education funding through the Perkins Act. Melissa plans to study Mechanical Engineering and Symbolic Systems at Stanford University.