Name: Insia Ali Zaidi

Recipient Year: 2021

Major: Law

Description: Insia graduated from NYU in 2016 with a degree both in Economics and Psychology. During her undergraduate career, she worked with incarcerated, adolescent, male students at Rikers Island with the Petey Greene Program; this initially sparked her interest in learning about the school-to-prison pipeline and educational inequity. She taught middle school math in Compton/Watts as a 2016 TFA Los Angeles corps member. At the same time, she received the “Researcher of the Year” award for her thesis “Teacher Biases and Disciplinary Tactics” during her master's program at Loyola Marymount University . After the corps, Insia returned to NYC to pursue her interest in macroeconomics as a foreign exchange currency trader at the Swiss investment bank, UBS. She also resumed her work with the Petey Greene Program as their program coordinator and a volunteer tutor. Seeking to return to public interest, Insia decided to pivot to the legal field with plans on doing death penalty and public defense work.

School Name: UC Berkeley

Sponsor: Ghulam and Arifa Azad Family Scholarship