Brooklyn private independent school

Nadine K. '16 Harvard '20


The main thing I learned from my 12 years at Berkeley Carroll, that really influenced everything I did, was to do what I love. Berkeley Carroll gave me opportunities to find what I was passionate about, and, once I found that passion, faculty did everything to help support me in pursuit of it. As a result, the intellectual experience I received from Berkeley Carroll felt one of a kind.

One of my first passions that I found at Berkeley Carroll was a love of math. It’s something that started in the Lower School when I was doing math challenges in class. Working together to solve problems in that class instilled in me at a young age the confidence that anything is possible when you work hard and work together. This led to my decision to join the middle school math team, MathCounts. That experience made me excited about solving problems and reinforced the idea that Berkeley Carroll gave my all the tools to solve any problem thrown at me.

One of the most enriching experiences for me at Berkeley Carroll was my time in the Science Research and Design program from 10th-12th grade. In that program I found a passion for Bioengineering, and that passion is something I’m now pursuing at Harvard University. I don’t think it would have made it there had it not been for the opportunities Berkeley Carroll gave me while pursuing that passion. While at BC, I ended up getting to work at the BrainGate Lab at Brown University where I got to work hands-on on neural decoding and translating that into movement intention. And that was the first time I really got hands-on exposure to the intersection between math, computer science and biology and using all that to apply them and solve biological problems.

I was lucky enough to find a way to combine all these passions and continue pursuing them today. Berkeley Carroll helped me believe in myself in everything I do, not just math and science. The teachers and school always pushed me, and that ambition paired with the problem solving skills I learned has truly made me believe there is no problem too big for me to solve.