RKA senior chooses Princeton to study environmental engineering and empower Latinas in STEM

Lucia Villanueva, RKA High School student, poses with a Princeton T-shirt where she will study this fall

Courtesy Milton Villanueva

It’s graduation season and as students transition their way from one grade to another, a student at RKA High School has several prestigious colleges to choose from. 

Lucia Villanueva has been accepted to MIT, Tufts University and Dartmouth, among others, but the high school senior has chosen Princeton University as her next venture.

“I wanted the flexibility of going into pre-law or like a humanities option and MIT doesn’t offer much in humanities – and I’m not 100 percent sure if I want to change my major or not,” Villanueva said. 

When the NYC sky turned an ominous orange due to the Canadian wildfires a few years ago and when the city experienced a pervasive drought last fall, Villanueva felt inclined to do something about it and decided she would pursue a degree in environmental engineering, which she will be majoring in at the New Jersey Ivy League school. 

“I remember that having such a close impact on me and it really motivated me to want to take action,” she added. 

As a young child, she was always fascinated with nature, taking special interest in local outings like the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Garden and the trails at Van Cortlandt Park.

“She was always thorough and meticulous with her schoolwork,” Milton said, Villanueva’s father. “Perhaps what I am most proud of as her father though is that she is a feminist, a young Latina woman of color who believes in gender equality, and she challenges injustice.” 

Villanueva’s family and teachers describe her as diligent, motivated and hardworking. The high school senior was on the track team and cross-country running team at her school and won a second-place medal in the Science Olympiad – a competition founded in 1984 where American students go head-to-head in 23 events focusing on various fields of science. She also mentors younger students at RKA and admitted that she felt an added pressure to be great because she is Latina. 

“Hispanic people are a minority at these colleges and to help other people from Hispanic backgrounds try to have the same good college application has been really exciting for me,” she told The Press. 

Latino students make up 10 percent of the total undergraduate enrollment at Princeton, with an overall population of 8.78 percent. And when it comes to fields in science, technology, engineering and math, Latinos are underrepresented, making up only 8 percent of the workforce, according to data from the White House Initiative on the Educational Excellence for Hispanics. Villanueva is consciously working to challenge those statistics. 

She works at Mount Sinai Hospital as a “virus hunters” intern, where they are currently investigating the bird flu virus in New York. 

“She’s obviously an intelligent student, but it’s much more about her work ethic than anything,” Cole Benack said, Villanueva’s precalculus teacher at RKA. “She was literally in my classroom everyday just ensuring that she understood every little thing.” 

Villanueva lives in Central Riverdale with her parents and two siblings, one of which completed his sophomore year at MIT, her older brother Alejandro.

“It’s important to take initiative and to not let others tell you what you can’t do,” she added. “A lot of times you just have to become creative in your approach or look for a solution rather than focus on the problem.”