My family consists of my mom, my dad, and my sister Aarthi. I love spending time with my family, and some of the activities we all enjoy doing are traveling and watching movies together. Someone in my family I look up to the most is definitely my sister, because given our 8 year age gap, she has always been someone that gives me the best advice about anything in life, especially as a former MAMS student herself!
One of my favorite hobbies is traveling. My whole family loves to travel, especially going to India every other year to visit my extended family. The most memorable trip I’ve gone on with my family is our vacation to Hawaii in 2019. We stayed in Kailua Kona, and there we visited the Akaka Waterfalls, the Hawaii Volcano National Park, and many different beaches. My favorite part of the trip was when we went on a helicopter ride over the entire island of Hawaii, because it was really interesting looking at all the waterfalls at rainforests from a top-view perspective. The reason why I thought this was a memorable trip was because I’ve always been a fan of beaches and tropical places. I hope to travel a lot more in the future, especially on a trip to Europe! Click through to see some of my favorite pictures from my trip to Hawaii, as well as other miscellaneous trips.
CyberPatriot is a national youth cyber defense competition that challenges participants to secure virtual systems against potential threats, and it introduced me to the exciting world of cybersecurity. As an extracurricular that I took up after coming to MAMS, CyberPatriot has been a club here that has resonated with me more than I would've ever imagined. I have a huge passion in the cybersecurity field. The idea of unhacking, finding vulnerabilities, and securing against potential breaches sounds so exciting to me, and I plan to pursue something related to cybersecurity in the future, past college. CyberPatriot pushed me to learn about operating systems, networking, and other major concepts that I never thought I’d master so early. I also believe that cybersecurity has a meaningful purpose: protecting people and data, not just systems.
One of my greatest passions, and something I have been doing for 10 years now, is Indian Classical Carnatic singing. I started attending classes in kindergarten, and it has been more than an extracurricular to me. It has been a passion that has taken over my life in ways I would've never expected before. The feeling when you perform on a stage, where all you can focus on is the violin keeping you in pitch and accompanying your every note, and the mridangam (a traditional percussion instrument used in Carnatic music) keeping you on beat the entire time, and the piece that took you weeks to learn, memorize, and perfect. It's a feeling like no other, and something that always resonates with me. Performing at various temples and other venues, my extensive training in Indian Classical Carnatic vocals has helped me participate in and win many competitions in the Greater Boston Area. I hope to continue this as a hobby in the future, as it is something that without it, my life feels incomplete.
Prior to the start of my junior year at MAMS, I volunteered at Community Harvest Project, located in North Grafton. Here, I actively contributed to help grow a variety of diverse fresh fruits and vegetables that will directly benefit those in need in our community. I helped in growing, tending to, and harvesting fresh produce for neighbors experiencing hunger. We then would wash and box some of the fruits and vegetables we picked, and boxed them up to send to some CHP partners, who would send out the fresh produce to different food pantries and soup kitchens. I really loved volunteering here, as it made me feel like I was doing something that would directly impact the community, and it felt really good to know that the hard work we put in here made such a huge difference and has helped so many different people.
