Today, while casually checking my email, I saw a very familiar name! “Jomaira Salas Pujols is awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship for graduate research.”

That’s my sister!!!!

Jomaira graduated from Bryn Mawr in 2013 with a sociology major. Right now she’s getting her PhD in Sociology at Rutgers University and she has the beautiful privilege of being awarded the NSF fellowship for her research.

(Also to her defense this picture is 6 years old and does her no justice.)

Jomi is such a passionate person. If you ask her about what she studies, she could go on for hours about her work and why it’s important and how she wants to change the world. My sister does it all!! She’s a Posse scholar, a Mellon Mays fellow, a PhD student, a Bryn Mawr trustee, a revolutionary, and now an NSF fellow.

I know she always talks about how Posse and Bryn Mawr and awesome mentors helped her get to where she is today. I love seeing my sister succeed and get the recognition she deserves.

Cheers for powerful Bryn Mawr women!

Last Monday Boston University’s school of Public Health payed a visit to campus. A representative was here to talk to students about future opportunities at the school.

Having recently declared my independent major in public health, I went to the event to learn more about what I can do after graduating Bryn Mawr.

The representative talked about what you could do with a degree in Public Health an helped me figure out what my options are. After that event, I think my interests tend to lie in community health/wellbeing, health communication, and health services areas. There are so many different things you can do with public health, but I am generally interested in people-centered work and addressing health disparities.

I also learned about other degree options besides a masters in public health. I’ll continue to look into a masters in health services and systems research, a masters in public health nutrition, and even doctoral programs in public health.

Going to this event reminded me of my junior and senior year of high school when I was researching colleges and falling in love with Bryn Mawr. I loved that time because I was able to do a lot of organizing and planning, which I have a weird fascination with for some reason. It also makes me super excited to start planning towards my future for after Bryn Mawr.

Oh, the places we’ll go!

I keep getting calls and texts from people who saw the new Bryn Mawr bulletin saying I’m on the cover. It’s somehow embarrassing and cool at the same time.

The bulletin features “Posse Power”; centering the stories of Bryn Mawr’s STEM posse. I remember getting a phone call from someone working on this story asking me to talk about my posse and my experience at Bryn Mawr. I talked about my sister coming to Bryn Mawr with Posse in 2009, me following in her footsteps, how different it is being in STEM, and what Posse means to me. A week later, my entire posse and I are at the admissions office having a real photo shoot. I was expecting us to sit in our regular weekly posse meetings and have an old camera take a few pictures of us. But, I walked into an entire studio equipment. Photo shoots are much more awkward and uncomfortable than I thought they would be! (I don’t know how models do it).

Just last week I get a text from sister telling me to watch her instagram story and I see her freaking out over me being in the cover of the new bulletin. She definitely got way too excited about it. But it’s cool to have Posse featured by Bryn Mawr and to have our stories being told! I am eternally grateful for Posse and everything that is does for us.

So I have never been a math person (nor will I ever be) but my amazing stats professor, Leslie Cheng, allowed us to get extra credit if we attended a math conference at La Salle University last weekend, and I could’ve used the help.

At first, the conference was very confusing and had geniuses present on math that I could never hope to understand. But then for one of the activities, we played a math game. Now, that sounds super unappealing, but it actually ended up being very interesting. The game looked like this:

It pretty much consists of trying to get three groups of cards that are either completely different (in shape, color, consistency) or completely the same. It was really confusing at first, but became more and more intriguing. There were a ton of math theories behind the game, and though I didn’t understand them, I really enjoyed how they turned math into something so easy.

The conference didn’t turn me into a math fan, but it did show me how differently math can be approached. Students presented on math in poetry and math as philosophy. It was stuff that I had never heard of and was really cool to see.

I still will never be a math major, but the experience was cool and the extra credit is cool too!