What I'm Up To
I’m an international student from Latakia, Syria. Other than my passion for engineering and research, I’m someone who cares about access to education. I’m currently volunteering as a college application mentor for Syrian students with SYE Initiative, where I focus on one student’s college application needs.
I also work for Princeton’s Audio/Video Services as a student employee, supporting the Princeton community’s AV needs in a fast-paced campus environment. Outside of work, I enjoy playing music and jamming with friends on campus.
My involvement with tech on campus goes beyond my campus employment, though. I was part of the Princeton Reunions 2026 Tech Crew, where I helped give alumni a smooth tech experience from start to finish. That work came from my passion for technology, but also from my appreciation for the Princeton community and my love of giving back to those who made my education possible.
I stay involved in the community in other ways, too. On the Mathey College Council Academics Committee, I help plan and run events that bring students useful academic, career, and internship information. And because I care about healthy, productive dialogue on campus, I volunteered as an orientation leader for Dialogue and Difference in Action for the Class of 2030, where I helped incoming students build the skills and perspectives that support inclusion.
My Story
The first time I applied to college abroad, I was rejected from Princeton. So I spent the next year working harder toward my career. That summer, I interned remotely with Uber Technologies, where I worked with a team to design a version of their ridesharing app for teenagers. Later that year, I interned as a computer technician at Megasoft International, a tech company in my city. I also made time for the things I love: I represented Syria as an Ambassador for Mauj, a women’s sexual and menstrual health brand by and for Arab women, and kept playing music on my own.
My interest in technology started in high school by participating in hackathons. At the AI for Good Global Summit, my teammates and I tackled climate change by building an app that uses GPS to find the shortest route for ships, so they can reduce their carbon emissions. At The Experience Accelerator, I worked on a learning platform designed specifically for neurodivergent individuals. Through these projects, I learned to identify global challenges, engineer solutions to them, and design the user interface and experience.
Later, technology became personal for me. I have amblyopia, an eye condition that is invisible from the outside and has gone untreated. I started by learning more about it. Through the Together We Seek Peaks academic enrichment program, I took sessions on research and academic writing and wrote a research paper on how amblyopia affects children’s mental health. Then I moved on to building. Through Codeavour by STEMpedia, I programmed a machine learning algorithm that identifies eye diseases from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans, and I designed an interactive surgery simulation model. I later scaled up the detection tool at Buildspace, an accelerator for creative projects, where I attended startup and tech lectures and worked alongside more than 60,000 other builders.
All in all, every project I’ve taken on has come from the same place: wanting to use hands-on technology and experimentation to solve real problems. That drive took me from hackathons in high school to electronic device engineering at Princeton, where I found my passion. My research on next-generation electronic devices is still driven by the little girl in me who wanted to create something that mattered.