Our team captain Anoushka Chintada won the Deans List Finalist Award for 2nd year in a row. The award was announced at Virginia State Championships held in Richmond on Feburary 2, 2019. She is one of the four finalists from Virginia. Last year she won the award as a sophomore.

Anoushka is grateful for the recognition, and it means a lot to her that her leadership and dedication to promoting STEM to young children in our communities through FIRST and programs like FTC, FLL and JFLL benefits many young students who can chose to embrace STEM careers. This is especially significant effort since majority of the students who are taking up FIRST are starting out as community teams with inspiration from other students who have done it, and showing why it is fun, exciting and also a great way to launch onto a STEM career. Over the past 7 years Anoushka played a very active role in helping promote STEM and FIRST to 100s if not 1000s of students through many dozens of outreach events. Anoushka held workshops for FTC teams at NoVa FTC Kickoff for the past two seasons, covering the topics of Java programming and Engineering Notebook. She also helped mentor two new FTC teams this year alone. Outreach in FIRST and a focus on STEM and science careers comes naturally to her as she grew in a family promoting FIRST core values  and dedicating themselves to FIRST, first via FLL and then FTC. This year Anoushka is also joining an FRC team.

As Anoushka heads to FTC World Championships, we wish her all the best to receive the Dean’s List Award from the Dean himself! That truly will be a dream come true.

Here are some photos: