Building a better world
MIT senior Arfa Aijazi might say that her path to the Institute started with the yeast-powered fuel cell she made for a high-school science fair — a project that led her to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. “The fact that I could model a natural phenomenon using things I found around the house was really exciting” Aijazi says.Or maybe it started before that, when a routine frog dissection in ninth-grade biology class took an unexpected turn, and Aijazi found out what a pregnant frog looks like on the inside. “You don’t always get what you expect,” Aijazi says. “That uncertainty and sense of discovery with science” fascinated her.Or perhaps it started years earlier, when Aijazi — now a materials science and engineering major and an applied international studies minor — peered through a microscope in her father’s pathology lab and tried on his much-too-large lab coat.In any case,...