Featured
In addressing this fall’s cohort of students inducted to the prestigious Huntington 100, Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun emphasized the enormous responsibility they now carry.
The university has upwards of 350,000 graduates around the world, Aoun explained, and roughly 2,000 have been named to the Huntington 100 –– an honor bestowed to Northeastern’s most accomplished students.
“You are part of a very, very select group,” Aoun said during Wednesday’s induction ceremony in East Village on the Boston campus. “Congratulations, you should be proud of that. I am proud of you, but it’s not enough.”
As members of this exclusive community, these students — who range from athletes and club leaders to researchers and musicians — represent the university’s future as “role models for the next generations,” Aoun explained.
“It means one day some of you may become trustees,” he said. “Some of you are going for a Ph.D. You want to be faculty, maybe faculty here.
“But don’t take my job,” Aoun said in jest.
“You not only embody the place, but you take care of the place. That’s the idea,” he added.
The fall ceremony was held to honor students set to graduate between December 2024 and August 2025. The cohort was composed of Husky ambassadors, resident assistants, global scholars, business owners, orientation leaders and more.
“Among us is an EMT volunteer, a model U.N. delegate, a WRBB radio host, captain of the varsity swimming and diving team, and the winner of an international hackathon in Abu Dhabi,” said Olivia Oestreicher, a senior political science and communication studies major and one of the student emcees of the night.
“We also have in our presence a recipient of three student production Emmy awards, winner of the Women Who Empower Innovator Award, founder of the NUWave underwater robotics team, director of the Husky Health Innovation Challenge, and a two-time winner of the Northeastern Interdisciplinary Case competition,” she added.
As a Huntington 100 honoree, fifth-year architecture major Ethan Rogers explained that the honor served as a great way to cap off his time at the university.
Rogers serves as president of Northeastern’s Architecture Club and is heavily involved in Northeastern Hillel, which enriches Jewish life on campus. He’s also had the chance to study abroad in Spain and did co-ops at two Boston architecture firms.
While in Spain, Rogers was able to combine his experience in architecture with his Jewish background. Having been awarded the Holocaust Legacy Foundation Gideon Klein Award, Rogers created a digital model and virtual walkthrough of a synagogue he had visited in a concentration camp in the Czech Republic.
“I went back to that place,” he said. “I documented it in full because the place had been damaged by flooding in recent years, so it was kind of an act of preservation.”
As executive director of Scout, Northeastern’s creative collective, Adeline Park has spent her four years at the university channeling her love of design to help achieve more equity and change. A Huntington 100 inductee, she has been a key coordinator in helping put on the organization’s annual design conference.
“It’s a lot of managing our teams, our clients, and just trying to make the organization better,” she said.
Others honorees had a more musical bent, including Alexandra Maropakis, a fourth-year behavioral neuroscience student, and Suvir Ghai, a fourth-year economics and business administration major and president of Northeastern’s first Indian music band, NU Aaroh.
They both performed during the ceremony, with Maropakis doing a piece by German composer Johann Sebastian Bach on clarinet and Ghai a drum-based piece influenced by English, Hindi and Punjabi.