While the weather cools down, we’re still warming up with our Fresh Encounters! Our next highlight from Cohort 11 is Ava Rathenberg who loves music, matcha, and Murakami. Rathenberg is excited to learn more about the process of creating a product from initial design to launch and wants to collaborate closely with her classmates throughout her time at the Academy. In middle school, Rathenberg successfully crowd-funded a board game that helped her raise over $10,000; the proceeds of which were partially donated to schools to support first-generation students in their pursuit to attend college and partially to help victims of the California fires.

Tell us a little bit about your journey to the Iovine and Young Academy. What were you looking for in an undergraduate program?

When my hand holds a piece of clay, a pencil, or a keyboard, I feel that the world has no limits. My passion is to make a real difference in people’s lives, combining technology and human-centered design. While in high school, I was told that college is a binary, linear path where you can only focus your passions into one distinct subject.  After discovering what the Iovine and Young Academy is, I immediately felt a sense of excitement. The Iovine and Young Academy is everything that I was told a school could never accomplish: having an interdisciplinary approach to design that focuses on furthering your education in a hands-on way. 

What are you most looking forward to at the Academy?

I am most looking forward to meeting and collaborating with other students who share the same interdisciplinary passions that I do, with big ideas that they want to come to life.

What are three goals you want to accomplish during your time at the Academy and/or USC

Three goals that I want to accomplish during my time at USC are definitely to learn more about the process of creating a product, from initial design to product launch, collaborate with my classmates to create new ideas, and make the most of the interdisciplinary program that Iovine and Young offers.

Let’s say you were miraculously provided $1,000,000 in seed funding tomorrow. What would you create?

My father's side of the family has a history of Alzheimer’s, with his mother having been afflicted by it and his grandfather having experienced severe dementia. The early symptoms that my father is exhibiting have steeled my determination to create a solution that will improve the quality of life for Alzheimer’s patients. I would like to develop a pair of augmented reality glasses, so that just by looking at a person, the impacted person would be given key information about people and locations just by look, driven by an AI system. This could provide people like the ones in my family with facts about a person they are talking to and enable them to maintain a conversation. 

What is your proudest achievement to date?

In middle school, I designed and produced a crowd-funded board game using the Kickstarter campaign that helped me raise over $10,000+.  I was able to donate the proceeds from the game to help victims of the California fires and donations to schools to fund first generation kids to pursue their College dreams. It allowed me to learn about product design, and development, and gain entrepreneurial experience at an early age and also being able to give back to the Community.  You can obtain more information at https://www.discovergames.org/. 

Describe one thing most people don’t know about you.

One thing that most people don’t know about me is that I am a 2nd degree black belt in Taekwondo. I had started when I was four years old after being fascinated by an open-window Taekwondo studio I used to walk past on my way to kindergarten every day, and it stuck with me. While I unfortunately had to stop because my studio closed down during COVID-19, I am planning to join the Taekwondo club at USC. 

What is one thing a significant person in your life taught you that you’d like to share?

My mother always tells me the story of my great-grandmother, Mémé. In the 1900s, Mémé lived in Yazd, Iran, where her Zoroastrian family faced persecution as a religious minority. While she had dreams of becoming a judge after seeing so much inequality in her life, she was not allowed to continue her studies because of restrictions on women’s education. At age 14, she was able to flee from Iran to India by agreeing to marry, hoping to receive an education there, yet was still unable to become a judge. Growing up, I imagined that she must have been unhappy to not have achieved her dream. However, as I grew older, I realized Mémé had, in her way, found success. She was a caring mother, a pillar of her community, and an advocate for other women, including my mother, to pursue an education.

What is your favorite app/website and why?

Cosmos.so is my all time favorite website. It is a curated version of Pinterest that I use as inspiration to my artwork, and also where I find images for my design projects.

If you could be any kitchen appliance, what would you be and why? 

Definitely a whisker, since I use it every day to make my matcha latte in the morning.

What do you like to do/watch/read during your downtime?

One of my favorite authors at the moment is Haruki Murakami. His stories are wild fever dreams, blurring the lines between the mundane realities of life and fantasy, making them a joy to read. 

Music is a huge inspiration to me. Whether it’s jamming out to Brazilian bossa nova or swooning over classic concertos, it just gets me in the right headspace to be creative.

What do you consider the most impactful invention in history and why?

I would say the creation of the first-ever computer, the first-century Greek Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer that predicted astronomical positions and eclipses. It represents one of the greatest achievements in complex technology, and marks the beginning of modern-day innovation.

Tell us about a movie that means something to you. 

One movie that has always stuck with me is David Fincher’s “The Game”. The way that at almost every point in the movie the plot subverts your expectations, making you question what is real and what is not during the events of the game that Nicholas is playing was so thrilling.

FRESH Encounters: Ava Rathenberg

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