Jackie Stenson

Jacqueline E. Stenson ’08 redefines the word globetrotter. Since coming to Harvard, Jackie has spent a total of 14 days at home, electing instead to spend her breaks in faraway locales, ranging from Estonia to Lesotho. In her four-year academic career, Stenson has already been to 12 foreign countries and plans to venture to Ghana for the month of January. While she occasionally brings a friend along, the engineering sciences concentrator said that she mostly travels by herself.

“I like traveling by myself,” she said. “You meet a lot of interesting people.”

Among the interesting people Stenson has encountered on her travels was a Zulu man who brought her home to meet his family while she was in South Africa last summer on the Weissman International Internship Program. Stenson said her new friend brought her to his home, consisting of three thatched-roof huts, in rural Zululand.

“I don’t think there was ever a white person who had visited them,” Stenson said. She spent four nights living with his family during which time schoolchildren would stop by on their morning commute to see her and shake her hand, wanting proof that she did in fact exist.

Stenson said her senior project, the equivalent of a senior thesis for engineering science concentrators, came from her experience traveling in South Africa. She is currently designing a chimney for thatched-roof huts that would provide heat and reduce the indoor air pollution that results from using wood fires to cook food indoors. And in addition to project ideas, Stenson returned home with a curious souvenir: dreadlocks, courtesy of a South African salon.

Back on campus, Stenson stays active. An avid backpacker, she has served on the steering committee for the Freshman Outdoor Program for two years, in addition to running in the Boston Marathon her sophomore and junior year and playing rugby her freshman year. Stenson says her activities in college are a complete change from the ones she did in high school—freestyle skiing, waterpolo, and volunteering with an EMS team. But one thing about Stenson has not changed—her reputation as a daredevil. Stenson said that she has broken 13 bones, has had nine stitches, and has had 20 teeth pulled.

“I come up with crazy ideas and go through with them,” she said. “It makes everything more interesting and more fun.”