Yamoah journeys from DHS to MIT to Oxford

PHOTO: Davis High Alum Megan Yamoah has pursued science at the highest levels.

By Marion Delarue

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff––

Despite the many challenges of being a woman in science, Megan Yamoah has never stopped pursuing what she loves. In her third year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yamoah decided to take a step back and expand her experience from physics and engineering to economics.
Before graduating from Davis High in 2016, Yamoah was able to engage with science. “I might have enjoyed it more (then) because it was all new to me,” Yamoah said. But she wanted more lab work than she was offered in class.

In order to learn more, Yamoah joined robotics in her freshman year; she was part of the Robot Design subteam and
Robot Drive Team. “I loved that so much,” Yamoah said. “I learned so much about engineering and practiced how it actually works in the real world.”
“Megan (had) a consistent desire to learn and grow, she always had great questions for me about robot design, leadership, etc,” said Michael Corsetto, one of Yamoah’s coaches at Citrus Circuits.

After high school, Yamoah studied at MIT for four years. For Yamoah, making friends and learning from others was a big part of her college experience.

As an undergraduate, one of her friends came with a lot more background knowledge in physics. “She had taken factor calculus in high school,” Yamoah said. “I happened to be using that (same knowledge) a lot during my freshman fall.”

As much as she enjoyed MIT, Yamoha was confronted with a challenge. Even in a place that was still quite diverse, she would sometimes be the only woman sitting in the room. This challenge motivated Yamoah to participate in many groups and associations at MIT, such as the Undergraduate Women in Physics.

“(I thought) oh, there’s an issue here. Let’s focus my energy on trying to fix it, trying to build a community,” Yamoah said. “That’s how I coped with it.”

MIT was not the first place where Yamoah worked on building a community. She was already reaching out to people when studying at DHS.

“She put time into starting and growing multiple outreach projects,” Corsetto said. One of those projects became the Davis Youth Robotics program, which currently reaches over 500 third through eighth-grade students in Davis every year.

A few years ago, Yamoah earned a Rhodes Scholarship to study economics at Oxford. She decided to leave the U. S. to jump into the extended questions in
development economics, innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

She is now taking a gap year in London after two years of a very intense master’s degree. “I (didn’t) think I wanted to go straight into another degree … where I would spend the next years back in the classroom,” Yamoah said. “I (needed) to take some time for myself.”