Aleisha Sawyer, C'2024, has been accepted to participaate in the inaugural Expapanding Diversity in Economics Summer Institute hosted by the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago. She is part of a cohort of 45 participants selected from a pool of 200 participants for the three-week economics immersion program, a first-of-its-kind summer experience targeting early undergraduate students for exposure to economics.
Sawyer, an
economics major and
math minor, graduated in the Top 25 of her high school class and amassed one thousand hours of community service throughout her high school career. In 2020, she also served as a Girl Scout Ambassador, the highest rank for a Girl Scout, and completed the Girl Scout Gold Award Project. The project, "Beyond the Classroom," helps low-income and underrepresented students find opportunities to improve their academic performance in school and exposure to different careers.
In 2019, the Atlanta native became the only African American in Fulton County, Georgia to serve as a Bank of America Student Leader. She has also completed several internships and summer programs at colleges and universities such as Georgetown University, Howard University Georgia Institute of Technology, Bethune-Cookman University, Tennessee State University, and George Washington University.
Her hobbies include dancing, volunteering at local elementary schools, reading, traveling, and spending time with her friends and family. After undergraduate school, Sawyer plans to further her education with a Ph.D. in Economics and a Law Degree while continuing to build her Beyond the Classroom project as a non-profit program.
Following the 2021 Expapanding Diversity in Economics summer program, Sawyer and the members of her cohort will become part of an ongoing EDE mentoring network, and select participants will be eligible to participate in research projects and assistantships during the academic year.