Larissa Senatus learns about the world by doing
Larissa Senatus has been immensely curious about the world around her ever since she was very young. “I was always the one child that broke everything because I wanted to put it back together and see how it worked,” she explains. “I almost burned down my house once because I decided that it was a good idea to cut out the microwave cord and look inside the wires, and then put them back together.” Senatus, a mechanical engineering major, has found many opportunities to explore new subjects during her time at MIT, where her curiosity about how things work and enthusiasm for hands-on discovery have continued to motivate her. Senatus grew up in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, and she became interested in engineering while attending a small, all-girls Catholic high school. She didn’t know any female engineers, though her mother works as a maritime manager, an atypical profession for a woman in Haiti. “Maybe seeing that erased...