Karenna Groff during an MIT soccer match.
PHOTO: MIT ATHLETICS
Karenna was the second athlete from MIT and just the sixth from Division III to win the prestigious NCAA Woman of the Year Award, which honors academic achievement, athletic excellence, and community service. At MIT, she cofounded openPPE, assisting in creating a new design for masks and distributing them to essential service workers and health care professionals during the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. She also worked as an EMT for MIT Emergency Medical Services and helped implement software that aims to reduce maternal mortality in Tamil Nadu, India. After earning a bachelor’s degree in biological engineering, she stayed on at MIT for her master’s in biomedical engineering. Her thesis project at Boston Children’s Hospital focused on better understanding the genetic basis of epilepsy, in the hope of generating a new type of gene therapy. She is currently enrolled at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, with a view to becoming a neurosurgeon.
Q. What inspires you about your work?
A. You’ll probably hear it from a lot of MIT students: the core driver is trying to help people and make the world a better place. My goal is to be a physician, while staying true to my engineering background. I hope to go into neurosurgery, and to pull some of that innovation and tech and engineering along with me and do something cool there. I love applying bioengineering to neuroscience. You get the chance to work with patients and help people one on one, but then also to innovate and try to come up with new therapeutics, new treatments, and new diagnostic approaches, and apply all of those exciting engineering principles to a field where maybe I could help people on an even larger scale.
Q. How did your experience as a student-athlete at MIT help you on your path?
A. It has helped me in more ways than I can count. Obviously, sports at large give you an arena to practice all of these skills that end up being so important to whatever you’re doing. Teamwork, leadership, failure, resilience, all those things are experienced day to day in athletics, so that’s huge. Specifically, athletics at MIT was so important for me because of the community. You have this amazing team, my best friends to this day, who really understand what it’s like to compete to be an athlete, but then also what it’s like to be a student, and to have all of these extracurricular goals. Everyone shares that commitment, passion, and intensity. The best part about MIT athletics, and the thing I miss the most, is seeing those people every day and being inspired by them and pushed by them and encouraged by them.
Q. What’s your fondest memory of your time at MIT?
A. It’s so hard to pick one. There’s a clip going around where a basketball player or football player is asked, “Looking back, what are you going to miss the most?” And he says, “The lunches,” or “The team breakfast,” or something like that. I really relate to that. It’s those little moments that I’ll definitely miss the most, like waiting in the locker room for the bus to be there and just joking around with my teammates at 7 am on a Saturday for a long away game. On the MIT soccer team, we call them “the incidents.” One year we jokingly made our coach a book of incidents, the little things that went wrong, like someone forgot the pinnies, or we left something at an away game. Those little things that you can then laugh about together and look back on are always the best times, really the times when you’re just together living life.
Q. In your own words, why is varsity athletics worth supporting?
A. Varsity athletics relates to so much more than the outcomes and results that we get on the field. Obviously, that’s fun, and I do think we’re excellent at athletics, but the opportunity to participate in sports allows student-athletes to become so much more in all walks of life. I can say personally, from experience, I wouldn’t be the friend or the classmate or the future physician that I will be without having had the opportunity to be on an MIT team.
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