Engineering major Alisha Chulani \u201925 has been making her mark at Harvey Mudd College. North Hall mentor, Lab for Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics (LAIR) student researcher, two-time NCAA National tennis champion and Astronaut Scholar are just a few titles Chulani has earned during her time as a Mudder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI enjoy all the different things I\u2019m doing,\u201d Chulani says when asked how she does it all. \u201cI really love my engineering major, and tennis has been something that\u2019s always been a part of my life. So, it feels a little bit less like work and more like activities to have fun with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite her current success, when Chulani started her first year at Harvey Mudd, she had to work through a lot of self-doubt. \u201cWhen you come in as a first year it\u2019s really easy to doubt yourself and to think that you\u2019re not going to be able to do this or you don\u2019t fit in,\u201d Chulani says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But, by confiding in professors, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps (CMS) Athletics coaches, teammates and classmates, Chulani formed a support system that guaranteed a steady supply of encouragement and helped her take on schoolwork and extracurricular activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat support has been super special for me,\u201d Chulani says. \u201cFrom the engineering program at Mudd to the athletics at CMS, as I did more, I got to the point where I realized if the people around me think I can do it, and I\u2019m seeing other people do it, then I can do it, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chulani has been able to embrace her love for academics, something she feels is common among Mudd students. During the summer of 2023, she joined the LAIR team led by Chris Clark, emeritus professor of engineering, to conduct research in Costa Rica. Along with peers from the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach, and graduate students from the University of Costa Rica, the LAIR group worked on a seafloor mapping project in the Santa Elena Bay. Chulani and her team were responsible for programming the IVER-3 autonomous underwater vehicle routes and processing the sonar data it collected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was a super memorable experience,\u201d Chulani says. \u201cProf. Clark has been super cool to work with. I think being able to do this project with him and seeing the way he thinks about robotics and engineering in general has been really great.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Equal to Chulani\u2019s love for academics is her love for tennis. Along with being a two-time NCAA National Champion, Chulani earned a 2024 Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA) National Championship, is a five-time All-America honoree, three-time ITA Student Athlete awardee, two-time Harvey Mudd College Female Athlete of the Year awardee and was featured in \u201cThe Sixth Street Rivalry,\u201d an episode from LG Presents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOne of the questions my coach always asks is why we play tennis, and I think for me, it\u2019s the time of day that I can put my phone and all my work away and just focus on being on the court with my team,\u201d Chulani says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Playing tennis also has taught Chulani how to work with lab partners. \u201cYou get to learn how to work with different types of people, and the teamwork aspect of the engineering program has definitely been one of my favorite things,\u201d she says. \u201cIt lets me work with friends, which doesn\u2019t make it feel like work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chulani credits the feeling of community she has at Mudd for helping her gain so many accolades. She mentioned the advice engineering professor Josh Brake provided when it came to managing tennis and engineering classes, promising to never lower his standards but to help her and be supportive. Chulani also shared how the hands-on experience in her Introduction to Engineering Systems class with James Howard Kindelberger Professor of Engineering and Department of Engineering Chair Nancy Lape inspired her to declare engineering as her major.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After graduating in spring, Chulani will go to work at Nvidia, where, as an intern in summer 2024, she conducted tests on the automation framework of graphic processing units. Chulani\u2019s advice for other students at Harvey Mudd is to be open to the experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s something that I try to remind myself every day because if I didn\u2019t stay open to the experience, I wouldn\u2019t have found my love for engineering,\u201d Chulani says. \u201cEven some of my favorite HSA classes\u2014ones I never thought I would take\u2014have been recommendations from my teammates and ended up being super interesting to me. So be open and try different things because it\u2019s easy to doubt yourself, but you\u2019re not going to be able to get better at anything if you don\u2019t try it first.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Engineering major Alisha Chulani \u201925 has been making her mark at Harvey Mudd College. North Hall mentor, Lab for Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics (LAIR) student researcher, two-time NCAA National tennis champion and Astronaut Scholar are just a few titles Chulani has earned during her time as a Mudder. \u201cI enjoy all the different things I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-my-mudd-life"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2024-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}