Christine Konicki (Northern '13)

Christine Konicki is a 2013 graduate of Walled Lake Northern High School. While at Northern, she was primarily involved in music, including four years playing violin in the orchestra and three years in the symphony orchestra, participating in District/State Solo+Ensemble every year and the Michigan Youth Arts Festival in 2011. She was also part of the pit orchestra for Jekyll and Hyde in 2010. Outside of music, she was involved with Interact Club, Spanish Club, and Literature Society/Moticos.

After high school, Chirstine got her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2017 and her masters of Engineering from MIT in 2019. During the latter degree, her thesis was focused on computational social choice and complexity theory, and her supervisor was Virginia Williams. Since then, she has been working on her PhD in Computer Science at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and is currently in her fourth year. Her supervisor is Michael Wellman, and she works in his Strategic Reasoning Group.

In 2015, she had a summer internship at Mellanox Technologies in Israel arranged by MIT. She lived in Haifa, Israel and traveled around almost every weekend when she wasn’t working. In 2016, she had a second summer internship at Amazon in Seattle, WA. She received a full-time offer to come back after graduation (summer 2017), but ultimately turned it down to focus on academia, teaching, and research.

While reflecting on her education in Walled Lake Consolidated Schools, Christine said she had fantastic relationships with all her teachers, but especially the ones who ultimately wrote the compelling recommendation letters that also helped her get where she is; Mrs. Savone, Mrs. Curtis, Mr. Brown and Mrs. Lambert.

“I am thankful for my counselor, Mrs. Locricchio, who worked patiently with me and made arrangements with teachers so I could take the courses I wanted. She allowed me to do crazy things like test out of Algebra 2 just because I was bored and wanted to see if I could”, Christine said.

“Finally, she ultimately played a huge role in keeping me sane and getting all my “ducks in a row” in order to get into MIT....which was no small feat considering Northern was still a very new school and nobody had ever been accepted to MIT before, both of which worked against me when I applied.”

Christine’s advice for any current student is to shoot for the moon because you can.