Sixty-First Commencement
Class of 2026 Valedictorian
Urwa Faeaz Malik
Engineering major
Urwa Faraz Malik arrived in the United States from Pakistan in July 2024 with the goal of pursuing an engineering degree — even when the people closest to her believed she didn’t need one.
The eldest of four siblings and the first in her family to attend college, she had quietly gathered her academic records and applied to schools before leaving Pakistan. During her first semester at Kingsborough, she balanced family responsibilities, a full-time job, and evening classes. The workload was overwhelming. At one point, she considered leaving school. Everything changed one evening when she met a fellow student named Tanzeela at the campus bus stop. After listening to her concerns, Tanzeela encouraged Urwa to believe in herself, saying nothing could stop her from achieving her goals.
She was right. Urwa went on to earn a perfect 4.0 GPA every semester, make the Dean’s List, and distinguish herself in research, leadership, and service. Today, she graduates as Kingsborough’s valedictorian for the Class of 2026.
Urwa’s accomplishments at KCC are wide-ranging. In Phi Theta Kappa, she served as the lead of a campus-wide Wi-Fi improvement initiative under the guidance of Professor Midori Yamamura, working with students, administrators, and IT staff to address digital inequity and improve student access to online resources. As part of the CUNY Research Scholars Program, she worked with Professor Nathan Cooper to study how GPS-like navigation affects human spatial memory. In an honors research project under Professor Gregory Aizin, she demonstrated through mathematical proof and experimental design that an object’s distance from its axis of rotation affects its motion more than its mass does.
Her academic achievements have drawn national recognition. Urwa was named a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Undergraduate Transfer Scholarship recipient — one of only 60 students selected nationwide from more than 1,300 applicants. She also received the Phi Theta Kappa Oberndorf Scholarship, the Maida W. Gershowitz Scholarship, and the Leonard and Louise Riggio Scholarship, which supported her very first semester at KCC.
This summer, she will conduct research on hydrothermal environments and their implications for extraterrestrial life through a Research Experience for Undergraduates program at Cornell University — a rare opportunity for a community college student.
Beyond the lab, Urwa interned in the office of NYS Senator Stephen Chan, where affordable housing workshops awakened an interest in using engineering to design energy-efficient systems for underserved communities. Through the CUNY Spring Forward program, she taught elementary and middle school students to build and program robots at Brooklyn Robot Foundry. She also served as a student ambassador and a Federal Work-Study student at the STEM Student Advisement Academy, where her supervisor, Professor Paula Risolo, became one of her most influential mentors — pointing her toward scholarship opportunities, the Cornell REU program and the valedictorian application itself.
Her interest in engineering began long before she arrived at KCC. Growing up near an airport in Pakistan, a young Urwa kept wondering how something so heavy could stay in the air. That question eventually became a dream of working with NASA. “As I move forward to become a mechanical engineer,” she has said, “I still dream of space exploration. Now that dream is a step closer.”
Her most important takeaway is that success is never achieved alone. “The relationships we build with professors, mentors, and peers can transform our lives,” she noted. “Kingsborough taught me that asking questions, seeking help, and getting involved can open doors far beyond the classroom.”