Aafreen Zaidi
This award recipient’s commitment to the Honors College and Rutgers University has transcended leadership roles, class years, and even COVID-19. They have left a lasting mark on the Honors College through their work with community service as a Mentor in Residence and on the Student Advisory Board, winning the annual Changemaker Award. They have also reshaped the Honors College community by initiating and leading the Wellness Committee, a long-term project over three years that began with intensive data gathering and has grown to become a key priority of the Honors College mission. They have demonstrated a commitment to student wellness within the Honors College and have invested a significant amount of time and energy into making the Honors College a better place for all members of the community. They identified that the Honors College experience was innately stressful, advocating for the needs of students to spend more time on personal wellness while they manage their heavy academic course loads. Over the past year, they have worked diligently with the senior leadership of the Honors College to create, implement, and spearhead a Wellness Taskforce, which evaluated the quality of life for Honors College students. After a semester of collecting informal data in a weekly meeting with students experiencing high levels of stress, they and the Honors College staff put together a wellness report that helped inform the larger Rutgers community about student mental health needs. Additionally, their work with wellness did not end there, as they continued to pursue leadership in the Wellness Committee, a group of senior student leaders committed to making wellness a priority for the Honors College community. They played an instrumental role in the Letters to Strangers initiative, which asked student leaders to write letters to their younger peers to encourage and motivate them to stay healthy and well during stressful times of the year.
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