Nafees Asiya Syed will be pursuing her J.D. at Yale Law School and plans to enter a career in law and politics. In 2010, she graduated from Harvard University with honors, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. For her leadership and service, she received the Distinguished Senior Award from the Dean of Harvard College and the Director of The Harvard Foundation. Her honors thesis was on United Nations accountability in the post-Cold War era.

This past year, Nafees worked as the foreign policy and veterans affairs aide for a ranking member of Congress, Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Previously, she worked for the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. In addition, she has interned for the British Parliament and the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Nafees has written for popular outlets, including CNN.com and The Huffington Post. In addition, her research has been published in an academic publication, the International Journal of the History of Sport. As an editorial editor at The Harvard Crimson, she contributed to its popular admissions publication, “50 Successful Harvard Application Essays,” and she is an author for the book “I Speak for Myself.” Currently, Nafees is writing a novel featuring a Muslim-American woman and starting a website to help Muslims practice their faith at school, DeenMadeEasy.com.