Natalie Morningstar, a junior majoring in Computer Engineering, has been awarded a Charlotte Newcombe Foundation Scholarship. The Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation is an independent foundation begun in 1979 by the estate of Mrs. Newcombe, a Philadelphia philanthropist.  Since 1981, the Foundation has provided scholarship funding for mature women students at UMBC.

This fall, Natalie will participate in the "Returning Women Mentor Program," which is a peer mentoring initiative that the Women’s Center at UMBC is introducing to better facilitate productive and ongoing connections among the scholars in their programs.

Natalie is also a CWIT Affiliate and part of the first cohort of Transfer Scholars in IT and Engineering (T-SITE). T-SITE is funded by an NSF-funded S-STEM grant and will serve 30 transfer students as part of the larger CWIT Scholar and Affiliates community through 2017.

When asked how she came to choose computer engineering as a major, Natalie said "Before transferring to UMBC I studied a mix of motion picture film, digital multimedia production and computer science. Both classroom and work experiences helped to expose me to a number of theories and applications, which ultimately lead me to my interest in computer engineering."

With such a broad range of interests, she will have many options for what to do after finishing her computer engineering degree. "Right now I have a broad interest", she reports, "and have not decided which specific field I want to pursue. I really enjoyed my work in signal processing at my summer computer engineering internship at Ventura Solutions, Inc. and I hope to gain exposure to other fields as well so I can narrow my focus."