well-rounded: Prakah-Asante

optimize our business because that directly translates into producing better drugs,” she says.

This is not her first experience in the business world. In high school, she helped her brother monetize his highprofile social media account into a blog — Track and Field Forever — which gives people athletic advice. She’s known as the “family writer” and has drafted over 100 posts. Eventually, they began to sell merch as well.

Her story about Track and Field Forever leads us to chat about her own impressive sports experience. Though she doesn’t compete at the varsity level, Prakah-Asante was a very serious runner in high school and continues to train at a high level today. She tries to work out for 2-3 hours every day.

She’s also a dancer (“at Harvard they have free dance lessons, I don’t know if people know this!”) and a gymnast (she half-jokes that a main incentive for taking a class at MIT this semester was her desire to access their gymnastics facility).

If it seems impossible for a single person to do all of this at once, Prakah-Asante concedes that yes, balance is both challenging and critical.

“You do have to pick and choose. You asked me earlier if I’m able to sew as much during the school year — definitely not. That’s something I try to spend more time [doing] during breaks,” she explains, saying that classes and school-related activities take precedence during the academic year.

concentration?’”

Outside of art and STEM, Prakah-Asante has a strong interest in entrepreneurship. She cites it as something she wants to be part of her life after college, alongside work in software engineering and potential plans to pursue an MD-Ph.D.

Luckily though, she doesn’t have to wait until after graduation to begin. Just a few weeks ago, she was elected president of Virtual Discovery. Led by a small team at Harvard Medical School, the group does computational screenings for drug development.

“It’s really cool to be able to think about how to

Still, Prakah-Asante packs her days. Her ideal day starts at 6 a.m. with a workout, followed by some journaling (something she’s been trying to do more consistently) or creative writing. Her afternoons are less routine, but they usually consist of juggling responsibilities for classes and extracurriculars.

As our interview draws to an end, Prakah-Asante reflects on why her friends chose her for the superlative and why having diverse interests is so important to her.

“We live in a world where being a specialist is like, the key, right? You go to college and you want to specialize and go do that field, and I think that makes a lot of sense in a lot of realms, but it’s something I could have never done,” she says. “I don’t want to specialize because there’s so many things that exist out there.”