Wendy Fernandez, CCNY Class of 2019, is the recipient of a highly competitive GEM Fellowship. The award funds master's and PhDs in engineering for underrepresented students of exceptional quality.
Wendy Fernandez persevered against cultural norms in the Dominican Republic to earn a BS in electrical engineering from The City College of New York’s Grove School of Engineering with a 4.0 GPA. The Class of 2019 member is now the recipient of a highly competitive GEM Fellowship, which funds master's and PhDs in engineering for underrepresented students of exceptional quality who intend to work in industry.
Fernandez will attend Columbia University in the fall. She was also admitted to graduate programs at Stanford, Boston University, University of Texas at Austin and Arizona State University.
Each year, GEM identifies and recruits more than 1,000 undergraduate students, graduate students, and working professionals for admission to advanced degree programs at the nation’s top universities. The National GEM Consortium’s combination of graduate study and field-related internships make GEM fellows more marketable and more competitive upon graduation.
For Fernandez, the GEM Fellowship is the culmination of her intense passion for engineering. She resisted pressure from male relatives in the D.R. to “do something more suitable for women, like accounting, business administration or psychology” to become the first member of her family to attend college when she came to the US.
While at CCNY, the Inwood, upper Manhattan, resident, interned at CUNY, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Intel in California.
Fernandez was also president of the IEEE-HKN student chapter at CCNY and Fellow of the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.
About the Grove School of Engineering
CCNY’s Grove School of Engineering celebrates a century of educating engineers this year. Originally established as the School of Technology in 1919, it evolved to the School of Engineering in 1962 and was renamed The Grove School of Engineering in 2005 in honor of alumnus Andrew S. Grove, whose $26 million gift to the institution that year is the largest in CCNY’s history. A distinguished member of CCNY’s Class of 1960, Grove was a founder and former chairman of Intel Corp, one of the world’s leading producers of semiconductor chips. Today, the Grove School remains the only public school of engineering in the heart of New York City.
About The City College of New York
Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its role at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.2% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. More than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight professional schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.