Aleena Hassen Friess

Aleena Hassen Friess is a Neuroscience and Arabic dual-degree student minoring in Professional Spanish and Portuguese at the Integrated Life Science Honors College at UMD. With her honors college, Aleena is a peer mentor for first-year students; she TA'd for HLSC100; she founded the incentives program to strengthen social connections between students; and she was recently selected as the new community leadership service director. Outside of her honors college, Aleena is heavily involved with UMD's Leadership & Community Service-Learning office. She’s been working with Maryland Mentor Corps since her freshman year, and this upcoming semester, she will be starting as a team lead for the Maryland Reading Program! Aleena also went on this trip with Alternative Breaks and fell in love with what this trip had to offer. It challenged her in ways she never thought it would, and she thinks it was such a valuable experience, so she intends to apply as the Experience Lead for it. Aleena is also the fundraising chair for the UMD chapter of 1000 Schools --an organization that aims to build 1000 schools in Honduras. Furthermore, Aleena is in the Science Diplomacy concentration of the Global Fellows program and is working towards her EMT license! Those are just a few things Aleena is involved in at UMD!