Deborah Chi

Major: Mechanical Engineering

Certificate: Aerospace Engineering
Minor: Religion

Debbie is an aspiring aerospace engineer who pursues her studies and social activities equally with both passion and creativity. While engaging in these pursuits, what is most important to her developing camaraderie and forming lasting relationships with her classmates, friends, and professors at Duke. She is a newly inducted member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honors Society and a design captain for the Design/Build/Fly team among many other things. Currently her and her tent group—of which she is captain—are living & sleeping outside in a tent structure they designed to tent out in for the Duke-UNC Men’s Basketball game. Debbie also enjoys rock climbing, playing piano, the great outdoors, and traveling. Her latest trip was to Israel, where she and 17 other classmates traveled to archaeological sites all over the Holy Land in the hopes of using them as a lens to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Debbie’s interests in the Boeing Grand Challenge K12 Outreach Program stem from her upbringing in a socioeconomically diverse public school system. From her experiences, she saw how many of her classmates did not reach their potential as innovators and creative thinkers because they never realized how their education could apply to everyday issues and extraordinary problems. Thus this became her catalyst for cultivating students’ curiosity in the world around them, initiating new methods inspiring them to view math and science as relevant facets of their lives, and motivating them to be problem solvers that engage the Grand Challenges of today’s world. To her, the Boeing Grand Challenges K-12 Outreach Fellows Program is a formative and sustainable means of making a difference in the education system.