Karina Jougla, a 14-year Girls Inc. participant and recent alumna from Carpinteria, completed her first year at Columbia University in New York City this spring.
While attending Carpinteria High School, Jougla received a $15,000 Girls Inc. national scholarship, and she was recently honored as one of the first recipients of a $20,000 Pearl Fund Alumnae Scholarship.
As a student at Columbia, Jougla also became an ambassador for Girl Up, an innovative United Nations campaign she joined in 2010 that aims to give American girls the opportunities to become global leaders.
In June, she traveled to Moscow, Russia, to attend the G(irls)20 Summit, which brought together delegates from more than 20 nations around the globe to discuss solutions for improving global growth through empowering girls and women.
After returning from Moscow, Jougla came back to Girls Inc. to share lessons and lend support to teens in the Eureka! program. This five-year career development and college-bound program places girls on the UC Santa Barbara campus for four weeks each summer.
Jougla has been leading workshops on campus and sharing personal experiences of college life.
“I only wish that I could have participated in Eureka! when I was in middle school,” said Jougla, summer camp counselor with the Eureka! program. “It’s just simply not true that girls are naturally less interested than boys in STEM fields. I have seen firsthand how when you give a girl the opportunity to explore science and technology for herself, she is empowered to envision a future in which going to college is a reality and she can become a rocket scientist or computer programmer.”
— Jill Tyler represents Girls Inc. of Carpinteria.