Fights For Causes, Gets Stuff Done

Jennifer N. Wynn ’06 did not always know she would go to Harvard.

Growing up underprivileged in New York City, the more salient question was whether she would go to college at all.

“When you live in a low-income minority neighborhood, college isn’t really something you speak about,” she says. “If it happens it’s great, and if it doesn’t then you work and try to support your family.”

But when the non-profit advocacy group Prep-for-Prep recruited her to go to Trinity, a private Manhattan preparatory school, Wynn’s life changed forever.

“My parents had always focused on education as the tool for socioeconomic mobility and the way to lift ourselves up from whatever situation we were in,” she says. “Once I was in a private school, it was understood that the next step to an educational life fulfilled would be college.”

Once she got here, Wynn sought from the beginning to make Harvard a better place.

“I think Harvard took ‘fighting for things I want to get done’ to a new level,” she says. “[It made me] think about what kind of impact I want to have on the world.”

She dedicated herself to increasing opportunities for minority students, beginning by becoming an alumni representative of the Black Students’ Association her freshman year. Last year, she was an integral member of the Darfur Divestment Campaign, and this year, as BSA vice president, she planned the Black Alumni Weekend, only the third in the school’s history.

BSA President Nneka C. Eze ’07 recalls long nights she and Wynn spent applying for grants. “She’s very committed to everything that she’s involved in,” Eze says. “I knew she would not leave until we were done.”

“We like to call her Mother Teresa,” says friend and roommate Shirley V. Cardona ’06. “The entire time we’ve been in college people have asked ‘What’s Jenn going to do when she graduates?’ and we’ll say, ‘She’s going to save the world.’”