Here are some other projects I’ve been involved in.
MIT Physics Graduate Application Assistance Program
I am proud to bring your attention to the newly established assistance program for the Physics graduate program at MIT, PhysGAAP, which I’m currently involved in kicking off as part of the Graduate Admissions Advisory Council at MIT Physics. PhysGAAP is designed to pair prospective graduate school applicants with current graduate students to assist them through the application process, provide insight into graduate school and the MIT Physics Department, provide feedback on their application, and answer any questions they might have.
Here is our amazing poster and here is a link to more information on PhysGAAP as well as other student resources we managed to push through.
Encouraging Women Across All Borders
In the summer of 2019, I co-founded Encouraging Women Across All Borders (EWAAB) with my good friend Kaitlin Gili. Our vision was to create a platform to support the confidence of young women. Our strategy became to:
- encourage undergraduate women to go outside of their comfort zone in their academic abilities as well as other passions and explore what’s possible,
- provide them with tools to boost their communication and leadership skills to be able to seize opportunities,
- connect them to a global support network of inspirational women, both junior and senior.
We managed to kick off the EWAAB mentoring program (later known as Encourage Her) at 8 universities ranging from Canada to Australia in the inaugural year, together impacting 27 mentees across 6 countries. Since then, EWAAB has expanded into a non-profit organisation. Beyond the second year of the mentoring program, we are now also building a separate software platform for our network as well as a virtual library of short videos of inspirational speakers talking about the challenges they’ve faced.
In addition, we also operate the Her Story blog series. Here are my contributions:
- Research to Reach Out and Reach Out to Research: The Key to Creating Opportunities
- An Open Letter to the Ambitious Introvert
You can read more up-to-date information about EWAAB here. We were also featured in the Scientific American and SME (the largest Slovak newspaper).
Discover Summer Academy
In August 2020, I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to teach at the Discover Summer Academy. This is a week-long academic camp for high school students from Slovakia and beyond to learn exciting things beyond the high-school curriculum and participate in numerous workshops.
For this occasion, I designed a week-long course in Quantum Physics, where we learnt about the recent developments in quantum information, quantum measurements and quantum imaging. We touched on topics like teleportation, detecting gravitational waves or potential future uses of quantum physics in medicine. I am currently in the process of composing detailed notes from this course, which will appear here once finished.
Unimak
Unimak is a volunteer group of over 60 Slovak and Czech students from top universities around the world. Our mission is to spread awareness of the possibilities for young Slovaks and Czechs to study at world leading universities. Our activities include advising on issues related to choosing and applying to universities abroad, outreach talks, videos and blogs.
I have been involved ever since entering my undergraduate studies in 2016. In 2019/2020, I served as the president.
Check out our website (in Slovak and Czech only) here.