After high school, Boardman enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD ) to study photography. While a student there, she took advanced math classes at nearby Brown University, where she took an interest in engineering and mechanics: she began building her own cameras.

After she earned a bachelor of fine arts from RISD, she returned to her hometown, Montclair, and enrolled at NJIT, thinking she would study her new passion: mechanical engineering. But another passion of hers -- green technology and alternative energy -- took precedence, and she majored instead in electrical engineering. In the summer of 2009, she worked as an intern at GE, where she focused on wind technology. She hopes to one day work as a GE engineer who specializes in developing wind technology.

She is a scholar in the Albert Dorman Honors College with a 3.8 grade-point average. She has five endowed scholarship and belongs to three engineering honor societies. She writes for the Honors College newsletter as well as for the student newspaper, the Vector. She volunteers to build houses with Habitat for Humanity and she reads to inner-city children.  At NJIT, she tutors engineering students.

But she is best known for her work for Engineers Without Borders, the award-winning student group. As vice president of the group, she has travelled to Haiti with other student members to help Haitians get clean drinking water by using bio-sand filters.  She’s a student with an engineer’s mind, an artist’s eye, and a humanitarian’s heart. As such, she has the potential to develop renewable energy and change the world.