Hometown:

Bloomington, IN

Biography

A National Merit Scholar and an AP Scholar with Distinction, Cecilia graduated from Bloomington High School South, where she was captain of the Math and Interdisciplinary Academic Super Bowl teams and active in Science Olympiad, VEX Robotics, and Spell Bowl. Her senior year she worked for the IU Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies on the design, fabrication, and programming of autonomously flying quadcopters and wrote the program to analyze data collected from them. The Indiana Affiliate of the National Center for Women and Information Technology honored her with a 2016 Aspirations in Computing Award, and she was the 2015 National Award Runner-up. She served as a fund development intern at Middle Way House, a domestic violence shelter for women and their children, and placed second in the 2013 Bloomington Playwrights Project competition. In addition to English, she speaks Slovak, Spanish, and Czech and has been learning Russian and Esperanto. She has already completed a math minor at IU and plans to major in economic consulting.

Her favorite quote comes from Terry Pratchett’s Equal Rites: “She was already learning that if you ignore the rules, people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don’t apply to you.”

She will hold the IU Credit Union Scholarship in the Wells Scholars Program.