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| MAREENA ROBINSON Hometown: Miami, Florida Doctoral Candidate: Nuclear Science and Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology B.S. (2011) Physics, Florida A&M University Courtesy MIT News |
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- When she was accepted into the undergraduate business program at Florida A&M University (FAMU), Mareena Robinson thought she had her future all figured out: She would go to law school and become an attorney, like her father, or else a businesswoman.
But when she and her father arrived on campus at the beginning of freshman year, he made an offer the self-described “obedient daughter” couldn’t refuse: to pay a visit to the physics department, where he had a distant connection to a friend-of-a-friend.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll just check it out,’” Robinson says. “I had no intention of going into physics. But when I got up there they treated me like a football player.”
She was surprised — after all, the department didn’t know anything about her, and had no idea whether she could cut it as a physics major. “They were so excited about anybody who was even willing to talk about the possibility of doing science because it is a select few people who have the audacity to try something like that,” she says.
Her father was sold on the program, telling her: “Mareena, I don’t know anything about this physics stuff. I can’t do one equation. But I feel like this is the wave of the future and I just need you to try it. And if you hate it or you can’t do it, you can be a theater major for all I care. But just give it a shot.”
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