Obiageli Nwodoh ’21 repurposed her STEM skills to pave a pre-law path at MIT and pursue social justice.

When [Nwodoh] arrived at MIT, she already felt at home. A native of Bedford, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Thomas Nwodoh, a former MIT Media Lab researcher; her first physics teacher at Bedford High was an MIT alum, Joe Zahka; and she had participated in the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) program.

At MIT, she studied physics, excelling in research, data analytics, machine learning, and computer programming. “I fell in love with physics because it touched reality,” says Nwodoh. “I had a way of explaining the world in numbers when words were challenging. It was learning a new language and using it to describe the world...I have cherished how being a physicist has prepared me to not be a physicist.”

"The laws of physics and the physics of law" by Sandi Miller, Department of Physics, MIT News, 2 September 2021