Why I joined
I came to CMU differently than most of my peers. After three years working at Tesla and Intel, I returned to school alongside students arriving straight from undergrad, and the difference in perspective was immediately visible. I had seen what actually matters after graduation, how industry is navigated, and what burnout costs; many of my classmates were carrying the stress of graduate coursework with no way to gauge it and nobody to tell them it was survivable. Becoming an ambassador was my way of putting that perspective to work for them. It is the same belief I carry into every community I am part of: whoever is a step ahead owes a hand to the people climbing behind them.
Why the role needed to exist
When I was a master’s student in CMU’s Mechanical Engineering department, the graduate ambassador program already existed, and so did its instinct to listen: student feedback was gathered and shaped into projects meant to improve the department. What was missing was follow-through. With every ambassador balancing the role against coursework, accountability for projects drifted, the work taken on grew less ambitious, and direct change rarely landed. I proposed and established the Lead Graduate Student Ambassador position to fix that, and served as its first holder: leading the largest ambassador group in the program’s history (eight members), setting direction, keeping several parallel projects on track, and working directly with department administration to turn student feedback into departmental improvements. I tried to be both a sounding board for my team and a hands-on collaborator, jumping in wherever a project needed support.
Listening before building
I kept listening at the center of the role. Our team ran townhalls each semester to gather direct input from the graduate student body, and every project we took on traces back to those conversations and the ones that happened around study-session tables. Four defined my tenure:
Classroom alignment. We advocated for bringing lecture-recording practices in line with current educational literature on post-COVID instruction: recordings available as a genuine study and review tool, with guidance structured to discourage the misuse that erodes in-person attendance.
Curriculum alignment. We surveyed employers and recent graduates to identify skill gaps between coursework and industry expectations, then proposed targeted departmental changes to better prepare students for their post-graduation roles.
Entrepreneurial pathways. We expanded student engagement with the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, raising awareness of its programs and resources so more graduate students could take the path from research to startup.
Industry connections. We guided partnerships with Pittsburgh-area companies, creating networking and recruitment pathways for students who had no map for navigating industry.
I led the classroom and curriculum work end to end, carrying both to the department’s Graduate Education Committee as formal recommendations grounded in survey data and published research rather than anecdotes.
The everyday fabric
Advocacy also meant the unglamorous work of keeping a community connected. Our team maintained a recurring newsletter of campus events, departmental announcements, and resources graduate students would otherwise miss. We organized extended study sessions with dedicated work time and snacks, and pushed for the MS lounge to become the shared hub it was meant to be. As the master’s student liaison to MEGSO, the department’s graduate student organization, I helped balance its programming between de-stress events and the programs that build resumes and networks. The de-stress half was deliberate. I put much of my time there because so many students were running themselves down over coursework, and a scheduled reason to step away and unwind was exactly what they would never give themselves.
And I mentored graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds adjusting to unfamiliar academic structures, focusing on the unwritten norms of graduate study that first-generation students encounter without inherited guidance.
Recognition
In May 2026 the department awarded me the Jeremiah Mpagazehe Graduate Student Service Award for this work. The recognition I value most, though, is that the Lead Ambassador position exists at all: a standing structure connecting students to their department, built to keep working long after my tenure.
