It's really nice to have connected community.
Avanti Prabakaran entered CEE as a freshman Chemical Engineering major in Fall 2023. She had known she wanted to major in engineering of some kind, and was attracted to UMD because of its strong engineering school. She switched to Civil and Environmental Engineering in her first semester, when she learned more about what civil engineering involved. She is now a sophomore pursuing the Environmental/ Water Resources track.
Avanti has been involved in several Clark School and CEE Department organizations. The first club she joined on campus was Engineers Without Borders. She quickly became a sub-team lead for the Nakifuma project, which has worked to help improve a Ugandan community’s water facilities. This January she spent two weeks in Uganda putting in a septic tank and the foundation for a latrine for a girls’ secondary school. She was previously EWB’s Events Co-Chair, and has recently been elected its President. “Most of my free time is spent with EWB,” she says. She says the organization struggled during Covid due to travel restrictions, and as President she hopes to build the organization back up with increased recruitment and student involvement.
She is also a member of American Society of Civil Engineers, and will be attending the ASCE Symposium in March to participate in a paper competition. She has also participated in the CEE Department’s peer mentoring program, first as a mentee and now as a mentor. She says being mentored “made everything seem manageable” in her freshman year, so she wanted to give back by mentoring. Beyond her CEE involvement, she is also a French Minor and a member of the Lambda Pi Delta French fraternity. She hopes to study abroad in France in her senior year. This past summer, Avanti interned with York Analytical Laboratory, testing contaminants. In her free time, she likes to cook and to walk around campus.
Avanti’s favorite thing about the CEE Department is “how interconnected all the people are”; she likes that she knows the people in her classes. “It’s really nice to have a connected community,” she says.
While she isn’t sure yet what she will do after graduating, Avanti says she may go into industry to get technical experience, and then possibly get a graduate degree. But first she has two more years to keep making her mark in the CEE Department through her leadership and dedication.
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