IUPUI is Indiana's premier urban research university. The campus enrolls more than 30,000 students in 21 schools and academic units.
Update: Angela graduated in May 2008.
Angela DeMien didn’t wait as long as most college students to pick the career path she wanted to follow. In fact, the IUPUI graduate in the School of Liberal Arts didn’t even wait until college: young Angela knew what she wanted at age 10.
As a fourth-grade class president, she helped set up a school Math-a-thon fund-raiser for St. Jude’s Hospital. The people she met and the stories she heard of families touched by illnesses and diseases of children made up her mind: she was going to be a pediatrician — more specifically, a neonatologist.
Angela, the daughter of a Hoosier father and a Korean mother, and part of an Army family at home on bases all over the continental United State, plus Hawaii and Europe, never wavered from her choice. In fact, her passion has only increased through the years, particularly as an infant care volunteer, with a special focus on caring for premature babies. To her, that’s a fitting career, since she herself was “a preemie.”
Volunteering comes naturally to Angela. She was a community service mentor in the Sam H. Jones Scholar program, helped coordinate the 2007 Martin Luther King Jr. “Day On” volunteer activities, and was president of Students Offering Service organization. Angela also helped other IUPUI students maximize their college careers as a resource mentor for the Bepko Learning Center. In addition, she volunteers as a youth leader in her church, passing along her experiences to another generation of young people. It’s a schedule she laughingly admits “has no free time” and which she once calculated means “my days are 33 hours long.”
She also excels academically; she’s an honors scholar, and earned both a William L. Bryan Scholarship and an IUPUI Outstanding Scholarship, both based on academic excellence, leadership and campus involvement.
Angela considers her place at IUPUI her destiny; she and her family had never heard of the campus, but saw a road sign on downtown I-65 promoting the IU Medical Campus and IUPUI. They caught the last campus tour of the day, she fell in love with IUPUI and Indianapolis, and “found the perfect place for me.”
