GustavoResendiz

Gustavo Resendiz, Jr. is currently a sophomore at Harvard College majoring in economics. Originally from Houston, Texas, he is a graduate of DeBakey High School, where he first began learning about educational inequality and became involved in community service and service learning. Throughout high school he worked with local education-focused nonprofits to develop mentoring and tutoring programs for students from underprivileged backgrounds in order to encourage the development of a college-bound mentality.

At DeBakey, he was highly involved in student government and served as the sophomore and junior class president before being elected president of the student council.  As a senior, he served as a Texas regional officer for the Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA), where he was part of a team responsible for planning and directing leadership conferences for the organization. In addition to serving on a leadership board for HOSA, he also participated in the competitive events section of the organization and was part of a parliamentary procedure team that won multiple state and national level awards, placing first in the state multiple times and finishing in the top three nationwide. The same parliamentary procedure team was also part of Business Professionals of America (BPA) and placed in the top two and three places in the state and nation for that organization, respectively.  He was recently granted the opportunity to judge the parliamentary procedure competition for a regional BPA conference and was glad to see so many high school students embracing Robert's Rules of Order.
Gustavo has served on a number of advisory and service boards. He was a member of his high school's Shared Decision Making Committee, was part of the Houston Independent School District's Student Ad Hoc Advisory Committee, and was also part of the Texas Medical Center Board of Student Affairs, where he served as a liaison between his school and the many educational institutions of the Texas Medical Center.
At Harvard he has served as a tutor for the Marshall Afterschool Program where he helps at risk students develop stronger reading and math problem solving abilities by helping them with their homework and creating hands-on projects for the students. He also works as a mentor for the MIT Office of Engineering Outreach Programs and has served as a teaching assistant for the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science program at MIT. Although he is now an economics major, he also enjoys the humanities and science. He is currently working as a research assistant in the Johnston Group in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, and has previously worked as research assistant in the Colvin Group at Rice University, where he worked on a project involving nanoparticle-induced protein crystallization. He presented a poster of his results from that project at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society.

The son of Gloria and Gustavo Resendiz, Gustavo enjoys running, reading, and watching his beloved Houston Texans, who he believes will make the Super Bowl any year now. Some of his interests include financial and capital markets, the economics of education, and learning about ways to alleviate poverty in America and in developing countries. In his free time, he enjoys watching low-budget horror movies and spending time with his friends.