2026 Alumni Award Winner Mahbuba Sumiya on Leaning on Community and Lifting Up Those Around You

At NAF Next 2026, Mahbuba Sumiya, a 2021 graduate of NAF’s Academy of Health Sciences, received a NAF Alumni Award.

Remarks by Mahbuba Sumiya:

I want to start by saying thank you — to the NAF community and to everyone in this room who has dared to imagine what’s possible for a student before that student could imagine it for themselves. Receiving this award reminds me what can be achieved when ambition meets the right guidance and experience — and NAF gave me the path to do it.

I was born in Bangladesh, the youngest of five. At nine, I traded humid afternoons for cold Michigan nights, the call to prayer for morning announcements. It took time to adjust, but by the time I reached what is now Crockett Midtown High School of Science and Medicine, I had learned to carry both worlds with me — taking the sense of community I inherited from my roots and pouring it into the one that welcomed me.

Through my NAF academy, I gained skills and resources that shaped my future—from teamwork to public speaking— in an environment where I was never afraid to make mistakes. On the NAF co-sponsored robotics team, under the mentorship of Ms. Schwendemann, I discovered the joy of innovation and watched one of my ideas come to life. That experience sparked the problem-solving mindset and creativity that have steered me ever since.

Throughout high school, I was always reaching for goals that felt just beyond my grasp. When it came time to think about college, I told my counselor, Ms. Horton, that I wanted to attend an Ivy League school. She dared to dream with me, even attending webinars on Ivy League admissions to learn how to better support me. That kind of investment can change the trajectory of a life. It changed mine.

I’ll never forget the feeling when the “View Status Update” button appeared on my Harvard portal, and then confetti filled the screen. I was the first student in Crockett Midtown’s history to attend Harvard — and I hope I won’t be the last.

I am endlessly grateful to everyone who helped make my dream a reality, especially Sana Shahul— my best friend and one of my biggest cheerleaders — who is with us today.

At Harvard, I majored in Film and Computer Science — blending my passion for understanding people’s lived experiences with systems-level thinking. Through it all, my NAF community stayed with me. As a recipient of the KPMG Future Leaders Scholarship, I was paired with a KPMG NAF mentor who, alongside many others, helped me turn my passions into a clear career path: law.

Today, I work as a paralegal at a firm focused on human rights and child labor exploitation, advocating for communities whose voices too often go unheard — much like those in our own Detroit neighborhoods. To the next generation of NAF students and our current graduates, I hope you will lean on your communities and lift up those around you. Carry forward NAF’s spirit of service, making every place better than you found it.

As a member of the NAF family, I am deeply hopeful that the best is yet to come for all of us who are part of this life-changing network.

Thank you.