Student Feature: Marcy Migdal 2024-2025 Fellow Samira Shirazy

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The Marcy Migdal Fund for Educational Equality is an annual scholarship awarded to exceptional University of Washington students engaged in work that enhances access to education for both local and global communities. The scholarship (currently $1,200) is provided to up to three students each year, and is open to UW students of all majors.

Samira Shirazy, a current UW senior studying Human Centered Design & Engineering, is a 2024-2025 Marcy Migdal Fellow. When introducing herself, Samira shared with the Center for Global Studies: “I am President of the organization AVELA – A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access at the University of Washington. In my free time, I like building Lego sets–I have a collection of over 40–and playing video games with friends!”

AVELA is a student-led UW organization that seeks to offer mentorship opportunities and connect with K-12 students while providing academic resources towards college planning, engineering, computing, and other STEM project-based activities. Past AVELA projects include teaching students coding fundamentals, 3D modeling, DNA extraction from fruits, website building, among other exciting course offerings that seek to enhance educational access and build community.

About her project funded by the Migdal scholarship, Samira said: “The Marcy Migdal Fund provided support for an AVELA class taught last summer. Middle and high school students worked on a 6-week program where they learned introductory embedded systems programming with Arduino. During the class, students were given access to use ChatGPT with little guidance to understand how and what they utilize it for in an unstructured manner.”  The Migdal scholarship also covered the cost of equipment needed for the summer AVELA class, and Samira added that they plan to submit the work to a research conference, giving the participants the chance to gain insight on future research projects and course offerings.

The Marcy Migdal Fund application is open to current UW students. Applications for 2025-2026 wards are due April 23, 2025, at 11 PM (PST).

Learn more about the application process here and click here to explore profiles of current and past Fellows.