In her commencement speech, senior Emily Batt will focus on the explicit connection between achieving personal success and building reciprocal relationships at home, in the workplace and throughout the world.
In her commencement speech, senior Emily Batt will focus on the explicit connection between achieving personal success and building reciprocal relationships at home, in the workplace and throughout the world.

Senior physics major Emily Batt learned an impor­tant lesson by con­ducting research on melan­choly 17th-​​century monks for a directed study as an unde­clared freshman.

“It was the first time I real­ized that one topic could be approached and under­stood from many dif­ferent per­spec­tives,” said Batt, who was named the 2012 stu­dent com­mence­ment speaker by mem­bers of the university’s senior lead­er­ship team. “Con­sid­ering a topic from a new point of view or with a dif­ferent method­ology can bring forth new solu­tions to old problems.”

Her research phi­los­ophy has shaped her wide range of experiential-​​learning oppor­tu­ni­ties at top-​​tier firms, labs and universities.

Batt has con­ducted research on phys­ical oceanog­raphy for Oregon State Uni­ver­sity; exam­ined the link between cancer and bio­log­ical cell net­works for the Dana-​​Farber Cancer Insti­tute; designed dozens of bio­med­ical devices for Fikst Product Devel­op­ment, a product design and engi­neering firm in Woburn, Mass.; and cre­ated a network-​​science-​​based com­puter sim­u­la­tion of macro­eco­nomic prin­ci­ples for the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nology Media Lab.

“Co-​​op showed me what my strengths and weak­nesses were and made me a more con­sci­en­tious worker and a better leader,” Batt said. “I was able to dis­cover jobs that focused on my inter­ests in very dif­ferent ways.”

Batt, a Mer­ri­mack, N.H., native, is eager to address some 20,000 grad­u­ating stu­dents, their fam­i­lies and friends at the university’s 110th commencement.

The bulk of her speech will focus on the explicit con­nec­tion between achieving per­sonal suc­cess and building rec­i­p­rocal rela­tion­ships at home, in the work­place and throughout the world.

Batt, who was named one of Northeastern’s Most Influ­en­tial Seniors, offered a per­cep­tive piece of advice to her peers, many of whom have already lined up full-​​time jobs around the globe. “Learn how to be pro­duc­tively engaged in many com­mu­ni­ties at once,” she said. “Try to be cog­nizant of the other people you are working with, and under­stand your moti­va­tion may not be the same as theirs.”

Batt was accepted into the master’s pro­gram in engi­neering at the Uni­ver­sity of Cam­bridge, Eng­land, but opted to take a full-​​time job with Fikst starting this fall.

She dreams of run­ning a studio in which fine artists and engi­neers col­lab­o­rate on exper­i­mental projects in sci­ence and design. “The work would be grounded in tech­nology and focused on aes­thetics and usability,” Batt said. “Exciting col­lab­o­ra­tions and new dis­cov­eries might not happen if people of very dif­ferent pro­fes­sions don’t work in the same space.”