I was freshmen when I attended my first high school dance. The theme that night was Cartoon World and I had the perfect character to dress up as: Buttercup (the green Powerpuff Girl). Many teachers compliment my outfit on my way in, but when I hit the dance floor, I realized the theme was only for decorations and no one else wore a costume. I was already pretty embarrassed, but then this guy dressed as Static Shock approached me. He complimented my outfit and he said we were the cool ones for dressing up. His name was Colin Webb. He introduced me to all his friends who also agreed our costumes were awesome. Some people just have a way of making the most of a bad situation.
As I got to know Colin I learned about his straight 98% cumulative average, his leadership throughout the school, and his love of giving back to the community. I looked up to him and, based on his experience and recommendation, I took up an internship at NanoLumens like he had previously done.
Colin has come a long way since then. He is currently attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and as if that wasn’t already impressive, he is also the current Freshmen Class President.
I spoke with Colin to see how it felt to not only be a student at MIT but also a leader. According to him, MIT is great! He said the best part of MIT is that he meets a wide range of people with many perspectives. When asked if being around such great minds at MIT was intimidating, he said “It definitely can be at first, but you have a choice to stay intimidated, or be inspired by it.”
MIT is known for its high academic standards, a fact that compliments Colin’s skill sets. “It forces people to collaborate and work in a team,” he explained. “Everyone has their expertise, so when they can work together they are able to finish something that may seem impossible on their own.”
As President of the class of 2018, Colin has met about 800-850 out of the 1000 students in their class, and he believes best part of being the president is knowing that he can aid in the communication between all his classmates. MIT is focused on STEM, and since STEM is the future, Coin loves bringing classmates together, to get the people talking, and to let them have a good time. Colin said his goal as president is for “people in his class to have more relationships with each other…and become business and research partners in the future and work on projects that could change the world.”
To meet his objectives, he’s organized group dinners, early movie premieres, themed food study breaks, and class wide competitions with prizes! Because of his efforts, he’s earned the respect of other class Presidents.
He credits a lot of his leadership skills to working at NanoLumens, a position which he says started off like any other internship – lots of cleaning and spreadsheets. The only way to learn and expand his skills, he soon discovered, was to take the initiative. He volunteered to help build displays and helped coordinate meetings with major telecom corporations. His internship at NanoLumens inspired him to always ask for more, not only in a working sense, but in a goal aspect too.
So, of course I had to ask what his plans were for the future. He is currently majoring in mechanical engineering with a concentration in computer science, but he hopes that in a few years, he can bridge the future of engineering and the leadership and business that goes along with it. Colin’s engineering goal is to actually create artificial intelligence (that hopefully doesn’t turn into Ultron), and knowing Colin, there’s no doubt in my mind that he’ll be able to do it!
As for Colin’s short term goal, he is running for Sophomore Class of 2018 President at MIT, and we wish him the best of luck!
Written by Karima Alkhalid, Marketing Assistant at NanoLumens and student at the Gwinnett School of Math, Science and Technology