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Gulliver Prep senior Maha Adnan is the Prep’s Silver Knight nominee in the area of Math.
Through the Gulliver student run program Together We Innovate, Adnan teaches STEM classes to children from underserved schools who attend Breakthrough Miami. She specializes in health classes -including anatomy.
She began working with TWI in tenth grade and has been creating the curriculum for the health classes for the last couple of years. The modules she creates are eventually sent to other Breakthrough Miami host schools.
“We want to create lessons that other schools can use to teach the underserved children in their areas,” she says.
When she is working on her lessons plans, she not only considers what she’s teaching, but how she can make the lesson engaging both for in person classes and those done virtually.
“If we were in person, we would be doing dissections of different parts of the body,” she says. “Virtually we look at the bigger picture –like human body systems.”
Adnan taught math to the Breakthrough students in the summer program. She teaches the health classes in the monthly Saturday program.
She loves how the kids have blossomed and now ask questions that show their genuine curiosity.
“They are doing it because they want to know,” she says. “They ask questions I wouldn’t have asked.”
Having taught both in person and virtually, she has gained even greater respect for teachers who have been able to adapt to the new normal.
“Talking to students who are muted in classes is way harder,” she says.
She’s enrolled in the Biomedical Program at Gulliver. She’s considering going into medicine as a career and what she likes is how multifaceted medicine can be. She’s interested in areas such as the public health, politics, policy advisement and advocation as well as medical devices.
“I do want to go to medical school and I want to pursue the biomedical route or the politics route,” she says.
She is interested in public health because of her family.
“My mother is a physician. She practices medicine,” she says. “The things she talks about fascinate me and what I want in my own career.”
Adnan often listens to conversations between her mom and her uncle who is a neurosurgeon. The conversations have often been about COVID and its impact on medicine.
“I think now more than ever there is a fine line between health and politics,” she says.
Her family listens carefully when the public health experts speak, especially Dr. Fauci.
Adnan’s family is from Pakistan, and she is aware of the problems of not having a strong public health system.
“Things are much worse on a global scale,” she says.
In fact, in Pakistan, there are still cases of polio because of a lack of public health policies.
That’s why the debate she participated in for the HEAL Club competition was so fascinating.
She and her partners took first place in the debate on vaccines.
“It was very eye opening to see the arguments,” she says. “The affirmative debate comes easy. The negative debate was harder for someone like me.”
So far, she’s been accepted to apply as a high school student to the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh but she’s still waiting for replies from Duke, the University of Norte Dame, and Yale before she makes a decision on where to attend.
Adnan is also a member of Mu Alpha Theta, the National Science Honor Society, the English National Honor Society, the Cum Laude club, and the Health Information Project.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
