Award Recognition
Columbia Spirit
Senior Marshal
Kennedi Wade is a senior Mechanical Engineering major and East Asian studies minor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. On campus, she has contributed to the diverse space that is Mechanical Engineering as an undergraduate research assistant with the Kasza Living Materials Laboratory and the Robotics and Rehabilitation Lab. Additionally, she has served as the Secretary for the Columbia NSBE chapter for 2 years, where she has helped bring students of color to internship and job opportunities through networking and interview prep.
Beyond Columbia, Kennedi has worked with the NASA L’SPACE program and helped design and develop a mission plan for a hypothetical payload to the planet Enceladus with a team of 10 other college students. And for the past two years, she has interned with Cruise Automation in San Francisco, where she has worked cross functionally alongside engineers with Cruise and General Motors to improve the reliability and efficiency of their autonomous fleet of electric vehicles.
Now, as she prepares for her next adventure after graduation, where she will be joining the Apple Audio Products team that works on the AirPods in Cupertino, California as a Hardware Engineering Program Manager, she cannot thank enough her peers and mentors at Columbia for the contributions they’ve made toward her character and mind over these past few years.
I want to first thank God for seeing me through these beautiful, past four years, and for every moment I’ve encountered to get me to this point. To my family, friends, mentors, and professors, thank you from the bottom of my heart. None of this would be possible without your unwavering support and consistent encouragement over this incredible journey! :))