The Young Women’s Leadership Award grants four $5,000 college scholarships to New York City high school seniors in support of their higher education plans. Chosen by an advisory board of previous Next honorees, these high-potential young women have exemplary grades and accomplishments and are headed to four-year colleges. This scholarship program, sponsored by Discover, has drawn from the mission of The Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance for the last 14 years.
Amelia Camilleri
Eleanor Roosevelt High School
Harvard University
Khadija Malik
The Urban Assembly School for Leadership and Empowerment
New York University
Rosario M.
Brooklyn Technical High School
Fordham University
Florine Tutelman
The Hewitt School
Cornell University
Amelia Camilleri grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but her circumstances were quite different from most of her classmates at Eleanor Roosevelt High School.
The public school serves a leafy neighborhood where many bankers and others in finance live, often in stately townhouses or large apartments. Camilleri’s family — herself, her father, mother and two siblings — shared a studio apartment for the first 10 years of her life.
They were there because of her father’s job. Her parents were born in Gozo, Malta, and her father immigrated to New York City when he was just 17. He worked as a janitor at first and went back to Malta to visit his family when he could. That’s where he met and eventually married Camilleri’s mother.
He ended up working as a resident superintendent in the apartment building on the Upper East Side, moving his family into the super’s housing on site. The building eventually upgraded the family’s studio to a one-bedroom apartment.
Navigating New York City as a first-generation student with immigrant parents had its own challenges, Camilleri said. Her father only had a high school education and her mother dropped out of school at 15, so she couldn’t ask them for help with her schoolwork. Despite this, Camilleri dug deep and applied herself not only academically but also as a budding social entrepreneur.
She began volunteering to tutor for two after-school programs and was soon promoted to administrative positions. “The behind-the-scenes work equipped me with the skills needed to start my organization,” Camilleri said. She founded Smarts4Heart, a babysitting and tutoring fundraising service that matches a network of high school students with families across New York City. As part of Camilleri’s mission to help others with similarly disadvantaged backgrounds, Smarts4Heart raised $11,000 for the Ronald McDonald House New York, which provides free housing to parents of children with cancer and other serious illnesses while they’re treated at hospitals far from home.
Camilleri’s academic and entrepreneurial track record got her admitted to Harvard, where she enrolled this fall. She plans to study economics and pursue her passion for social entrepreneurship. And, unlike most of her classmates, Camilleri described her spartan dorm room as “spacious.”
New York City has a multitude of opportunities for the motivated student. Few high schoolers actually take advantage of all the city offers. However, Khadija Malik is one of them.
When Malik looks at the family members and neighbors who live near her Windsor Terrace home in Brooklyn, New York, she sees a group of people who could benefit from advances in neuroscience. “A lot of the South Asian community is affected by neurological diseases,” says Malik, whose family emigrated from Pakistan. “I feel neuroscience is a gray-area field with so much more to learn.” Her lifelong desire to go into medicine also drew inspiration from her older sisters, one of whom is in training to be a doctor and the other a veterinarian.
Malik graduated from Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly School for Leadership and Empowerment, a public all-girls school, where she took advanced placement courses and had a perfect grade-point average. A lover of cats, she found time to volunteer in the ASPCA’s kitten nursery while also working with, and eventually leading, several clubs at her school.
Although the high school had few resources, Malik was selected for the Minds Matter program, which helps low-income students make it through high school and find opportunities they’ll need for their college resumes. She attended a competitive Columbia University program for students headed to science careers after participating in a similar program at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. She was able to attend an MIT engineering course over the summer, volunteer at Boston Children’s Hospital and spend a week interning at a private equity firm. She also won a scholarship to attend a National Geographic photography program in Japan, where she traveled around Tokyo, learning from the group’s famed photographers.
This fall, Malik enrolled at New York University, commuting daily from her family’s home to the school’s downtown Manhattan campus. She plans to major in neuroscience, but said she is considering a double major at NYU’s Stern School of Business that would propel her toward an MD/MBA joint graduate degree. “I like the business part of health care and applying it,” she said.
As she gets acclimated to college life, she’s trying new hobbies, including ice skating, after watching the Olympics. She’s hoping to take judo in the spring, and has signed up to volunteer with a hospice. Next stop: finding a science lab at NYU’s medical school where she can work as a research assistant.
Her advice for younger girls would be to seize any opportunities that are available: “Try to find anything you can do that sounds interesting to you and do it,” Malik said. “Don’t be afraid.”
When Florine Tutelman was going into high school, she took a step out of the heavily Soviet Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of South Brooklyn, where she grew up speaking Russian at home. She decided to apply to The Hewitt School, a small all-girls school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
That began a period when Tutelman commuted an hour and a half each day alone. Arriving at Hewitt, she joined a class of just 50 girls, which she called “one of the best decisions I ever made.” She dove into the school’s opportunities, earning perfect grades while taking the hardest courses. Despite her long commute, she also took on demanding extracurricular activities, working as a rhythmic gymnastics coach and conducting a school-wide research project. She helped to launch a nonprofit for young girls from underserved communities called Early Entrepreneurs, marshaling high school volunteers to teach classes on starting a business at places like the Brooklyn Public Library.
Tutelman wanted to replicate her high school’s tight-knit community in college. She found that sense of belonging at Cornell University, which has a highly selective undergraduate program, the Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management.
Moving to remote upstate New York, where Cornell’s Ithaca campus is — about a four-hour drive from New York City — was an adjustment. After starting at Dyson this fall, Tutelman joined two competitive clubs, Banking at Cornell and MergerSight, for students preparing for a career in finance. “It’s so great to be part of a community with upperclassmen and have that guidance,” she said.
She hopes to work on Wall Street and eventually become a venture capitalist, investing in startups and creating opportunities for women: “Being able to create a social impact through that, that’s why I’m so keen on VC.”
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