Carnegie Mellon University

Eight Dietrich College Seniors Named Andrew Carnegie Society Scholars

October 29, 2019

Eight Dietrich College Seniors Named Andrew Carnegie Society Scholars

By Stefanie Johndrow

The Andrew Carnegie Society (ACS) Scholars Class of 2020 has been announced, and eight seniors from Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences have been selected.

ACS Scholars are Carnegie Mellon University undergraduate students who combine high academic standards with extracurricular activities, such as volunteering, playing sports, taking on leadership roles and participating in student organizations and the arts.

The Dietrich College’s ACS Scholars include:

Alona Beloussova
Primary major: Decision Science

Beloussova is deeply involved in the student experience through campus organizations. In 2017, Beloussova organized the first TEDx mini lecture series, which is now a series of annual campus-wide events at CMU: TEDxCMU Salon. She has taken on various leadership positions as president of the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and as the student director of the annual Fresh Check Day, a campus-wide event which aims to create an approachable atmosphere where students are encouraged to engage in dialogue about mental health and are connected to mental health resources on campus. Beloussova also actively engages in research within Dietrich College, having worked with Stephen Broomell, associate professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and George Loewenstein, the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology.

Corey Emery
Primary major: Statistics and Machine Learning
Additional major: Human-Computer Interaction

Emery has sought out opportunities since arriving at CMU. As a first-year student, Emery attained his first teaching assistant (TA) position, and he has acted as a TA every semester since, leading labs, review sessions and holding office hours. In addition, Emery is collaborating with the United States Tennis Association on his senior honors thesis. In his project, Emery is using proprietary U.S. Open match data to analyze how physical factors of a point of a tennis match (for example, how hard a player hits their shots, how far they are forced to run) impacts how likely a player is to win subsequent points and how long this fatigue factor persists. Outside of the classroom, Emery has been a resident assistant (RA) in Mudge House and Webster Hall; participated in Booth, Buggy and Scotch ‘n’ Soda Theatre; and built the website for The Wick Editor, a free online tool for creating animations and games that is targeted to both elementary and middle school students.

Shlok Goyal
Primary major: Economics
Additional major: Statistics and Machine Learning
Minor: Computer Science

Goyal has worked with the Allegheny Land Trust to create interactive data visualizations of the water treatment at Wingfield Pines and, through the Auton Lab hackathon, estimated how many lives could be saved in Allegheny County by equipping police officers with naloxone. On campus, Goyal spearheaded the Economics Research Club. Goyal was also critical in launching the first CMU Global Challenges Competition, a hackathon-style competition that challenges students to develop a recommendation to address a global societal issue that integrates economic reasoning and data analytics. Goyal was also the chair of the Finance Committee of Student Senate, analytics assistant for the varsity softball and golf teams, host of a political talk show on WRCT 88.3, writer for The Tartan and Seeking Alpha, and a member of the Tartan Student Fund. He has also interned with the Office of Monetary Affairs in the U.S. Department of State, the Antitrust Division in the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Haider Nazir
Primary major: Global Studies
Additional major: Chinese Studies
Minor: Religious Studies

Nazir is active on campus as a participant in the Emerging Leaders Program and president of the Lambda Sigma National Honor Society and Chinese-English Third Space, an organization Nazir co-founded that aims to create cross-cultural interactions between Chinese native speakers and those learning Chinese. Nazir has also been an RA for CMU’s Summer Academy for Math and Science (SAMS) Program. Nazir is pursuing a senior honors thesis that combines ethnography, theater and historical research in an attempt to understand and represent collective memories of 20th and 21st century Chinese and Taiwanese history among people who lived through events like the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath.

Olivia Olshevski
Primary majors: Technical Writing and Communication; Chemical Engineering
Additional majors: Biomedical Engineering; English

Olshevski is a member of three honor societies: Mortar Board, Phi Kappa Phi and Sigma Tau Delta. She is the membership chair of Mortar Board and an alumni member of Lambda Sigma. Olshevski has participated in Scotch ‘n’ Soda Theatre since 2016 and currently acts as office tech area head. Olshevski helps first-year students adjust to life at CMU as a Dietrich College peer adviser. Olshevski was a co-instructor for the StuCo "Masculinity in the Wild" (a gender studies class focused around masculinity and intersectionality) and served as a writing and communications intern for CMU's College of Engineering last year. Olshevski has spent the past two summers conducting research. Through the Clinical Immersion Fellowship, Olshevski defined medical problems through clinical rotations throughout Pittsburgh and developed a list of 15 potential design projects for consideration for the Biomedical Engineering Senior Design capstone course. In 2018, she independently fabricated multilayer cardiac sheets for heart tissue repair with the Carnegie Heart Program on the research project “Engineering Laminar Cardiac Tissue Using Fibronectin Nanofiber-based Hydrogel Scaffolds.”

Victoria Reiter
Primary major: Global Studies
Additional majors: Chinese Studies; Hispanic Studies

Reiter displays her love of language and cultures in and outside of the classroom. She spent a semester studying abroad in both Chile and China, has participated in a two-month summer study at the Shanghai International Studies University and is a 2019-2020 student fellow in the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue program through Georgetown University. Reiter is involved in multiple campus organizations, including the Dietrich College Council, the Study Abroad Advisory Board and the Chinese-English Third Space. As part of FORGE (Facilitating Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment), she has served as outreach director and co-president alongside making weekly visits to a refugee family to work on adjustment to life in America and English as a Second Language (ESL). Reiter took this work back to her hometown of Rochester, NY, where she volunteered as a teaching assistant for ESL at the organization Refugees Helping Refugees. As of this fall, Reiter is serving as an assistant teacher in Spanish classes in Pittsburgh Public Schools through CMU’s Tutoring for Community Outreach class. She is also an RA for Morewood Gardens.

Marika Yang
Primary major: Professional Writing
Additional majors: Creative Writing; Social and Political History
Minor: Film and Media Studies

During her time at CMU, Yang has climbed the editorial ranks at The Tartan. Beginning as a sports writer, Yang became editor of the Sports section in 2018 and now acts as publisher of the newspaper. As publisher, Yang manages The Tartan’s budget and finances and works as an intermediary among the editorial staff, the business team, CMU’s student organization division and The Tartan’s third-party clients. She also continues to write articles for different sections of the paper. Yang’s writing abilities secured her a first place prize for fiction in the Department of English’s Adamson Student Writing Awards. Yang is also working on a creative non-fiction piece for her senior honors thesis, which analyzes cultural identity through the lens of food.

David Zhang
Primary major: Information Systems
Additional major: Computer Science

Zhang is an active member of the campus community. He has acted as a TA twice, participated in Global Business Brigades and Emerging Leaders and was a Highland Ambassador. Currently, Zhang is a brother of Sigma Phi Epsilon and a member of the Asian Student Association and Taiwanese Student Association, where he served as a leader and guide for younger members of the Asian American community. Zhang spent spring 2019 studying at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Last year, Zhang won Overall Best Project at the Microsoft New England 2018 Hackathon for his project on using blockchain technologies to better trace disbursed funds. Zhang also created Venloan, a peer-to-peer lending application that aims to connect borrowers and lenders in a global marketplace.

Pictured above: Corey Emery, Shlok Goyal, Olivia Olshevski, Victoria Reiter, Bess Family Dean Richard Scheines, David Zhang, Alona Beloussova and Haider Nazir. Missing: Marika Yang