When Vrushti Patel ’26 began her Lehigh journey, she was inspired to explore the world beyond the classroom. Over the past four years, she completed six study abroad experiences through programs at Lehigh that took her across industries and continents, broadening her global perspective more than she could have ever imagined.
Those experiences in Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Spain and Vietnam were guided by supportive mentors like Khanjan Mehta, vice provost for Creative Inquiry, who helped Patel transform the opportunities into a deeper sense of purpose.
Now, as she prepares to graduate and begin working as a software engineer for Walmart Global Tech, she is leveraging the skills she’s learned to make an impact.
“The Lehigh programs that I was part of focus on creating impact using engineering and technical skills, and I hope that I can continue to hone my skills in a way where I can keep making a positive impact,” she said.
Patel, who moved from India to the U.S. with her family and later enrolled at Lehigh specifically for the Computer Science and Business honors program (CSB), got a taste for travel when she joined the Office of Inclusive Excellence and Belonging’s Passport to Success as a first-year student and took an educational trip to Montreal.
“After immigrating to the U.S., I never traveled—I just stayed within the Northeast,” Patel said. “So having that travel opportunity was very big in terms of learning to step outside my bubble, step outside my comfort zone.”
Next, Patel was accepted through a competitive process to join Zero Hunger Project in Creative Inquiry’s Global Social Impact Fellowship (GSIF) program, where she partnered with an interdisciplinary team to explore ways to combat food insecurity in the Philippines by giving women critical financial and leadership skills to help them create progress within their own communities and help address food insecurity and malnutrition.
Mehta worked with Patel for a full year on the project and said she did a "phenomenal job” collaborating with the team, bringing a grounded idealism of impact with humility and a mindset of “getting stuff done” to their work, which resulted in several publications.
“We are all about making it real, making it new and making a difference together,” Mehta said. “That's exactly why Vrushti was just such a natural fit for our programs—she embodies and epitomizes that ethos of taking intellectual risks, trying new things and getting out of your comfort zone, because that is where you're going to grow the most.”
Patel recalled how Mehta supported and challenged the team to overcome any obstacles they faced and provided perspective on how to spur the project forward.
“I got to learn so much from him about systems and designing sustainable solutions for real-world problems,” Patel said. “He encouraged us to follow our gut feeling and try things out.”
Based on Patel’s excellent work on the project, Mehta said Patel was invited to join the “Sierra Leone: AI Strengthening Healthcare Access (AISHA)” GSIF project. Patel was part of one of the first AISHA project teams to develop conversational AI technology that provides health care workers in low-resource settings with medical information to improve clinical knowledge and decision making, increasing the quality of care and strengthening patient outcomes.
Mehta said Patel helped develop some of the early proof-of-concept prototypes that allowed the team to better understand the needs of health care workers, and now, they are working with several clinics and hospitals in Sierra Leone to integrate the technology.
“She just thrives in that early-stage startup environment fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity, and she built those prototypes and impact pathways for herself, for the project and for the rest of her team to bring them together to accomplish something remarkable,” Mehta said.
Patel was also part of the Office of International Affairs’ Global Citizenship Program, a one-year residency that encourages students to think deeply about complex global issues and how to create and sustain change in the world. Through the program, she traveled to Mexico where she participated in culturally immersive experiences.
She traveled to Barcelona through the Tauck Scholars Program, where she interned at an AI startup and analyzed data on consumer behavior in the food retail space to help improve grocery shopping experiences.
Patel also visited Vietnam through the College of Business, where she gained insights into Vietnamese business culture.
As a Clare Boothe Luce Research Scholar, a prestigious group of women undergraduate research scholars in the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, Patel conducted research on how Natural Language Processing can be leveraged to revitalize endangered languages, sparking her passion for AI and machine learning.
Patel said the combination of these experiences changed her perspective on global citizenship, made her more sensitized to other ways of living and helped her view the world beyond a single lens.
“One of the biggest lessons I learned is how important diversity is and how much there is for us to learn from other people,” she said.
As Patel embarks on her next chapter, Mehta said he encourages Patel and other graduates to continue to dream big and persist until they have accomplished something truly remarkable.
“Let's go big—let's focus on complex challenges that truly matter and strive to develop and actually implement transformative solutions,” Mehta said. “Let's build a world that works for everyone … for real!”
