“To me, giving back to the NJIT community and being a part of the larger college campus means pursuing your passions and creating your own opportunities to explore your interests. It includes involving yourself in projects and making sure to stay active in pursuits like clubs, research, competitions, and internships. All these things make for an amazing college experience, and I am so grateful to the university’s benefactors who make these opportunities possible for students like me.”
– Afshan Zubia Akmal ’27
Our August Scholar of the Month is Afshan Zubia Akmal ’27, a rising senior from Edison, NJ, majoring in computer science, minoring in applied mathematics, and recipient of the Diana Hoenig ’85 Scholarship. Afshan’s entrepreneurial spirit and commitment to innovation reflect the forward-thinking work being fostered at the Ying Wu College of Computing and throughout NJIT.
Maintaining a 3.85 GPA, Afshan has contributed to computer science research through the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program. As part of her research, she used machine-learning algorithms to analyze business data and identify factors that influence investors’ willingness to support startup ideas. She also developed a natural language processing pipeline in Python to clean, preprocess, and analyze unstructured text data. Additionally, her research has examined the meaningful role diversity can play in securing financial support for technology startups.
Beyond the classroom, Afshan is an active member of NJIT’s chapter of the Society of Women Engineers and regularly participates in hackathons and student competitions, including Hack Van Houten and the Verizon Smart Campus Business Competition, an annual initiative that challenges students to leverage Verizon 5G technology to develop innovative solutions to common data problems. This past year, she also gained valuable industry experience as an intern at Disent, a website hosting platform, where she worked on the firm’s product management and growth team.
After graduation, Afshan hopes to join a technology startup where she can take on a variety of technical and entrepreneurial responsibilities. Ultimately, she plans to channel that experience into launching a startup of her own.
To learn more about the impact that scholarships have on NJIT's students, please watch our 2026 “Scholarships Change Lives” video.
To support students like Afshan, kindly visit www.njit.edu/givenow today.
