Emma Mei Andreas (McIntire ’24) Joyfully Connects Poetry, Code, and Community

When Emma Mei Andreas first toured UVA as a ninth-grader from Alexandria, VA’s Hayfield Secondary School, she was charmed by the architecture of Grounds, but she was perhaps most excited when her guide started talking about the student clubs.

And with good reason: Andreas has long been dedicated to the powerful connections made possible through strong relationships and close communities. It’s something that has shaped her experience and supports the various and often disparate aspects of her many pursuits. Speaking to her, it’s clear that community will impact her future as she starts her career as a Cyber Analyst in Deloitte’s Global Public Sector practice, where she will be taking her many talents along with a McIntire education with her to the firm’s Arlington, VA, office.

With an analytical mind with a poetic vision, Andreas is driven by an authentic and irrepressible joy—the very same pure type of bliss she shares with others in the many groups and spaces she fosters so that everyone can thrive.

“I’ve found that each interest I have relates to creating community somewhere,” she says. “I’m really big on finding places where I feel like I can be 100% myself and then creating spaces for other people where they feel like they can express themselves too.”

A History of Connection

Andreas first realized the importance of community early on when she was still in middle school, finding solace from the often tumultuous, emotionally charged atmosphere of her quickly growing classmates by working with likeminded peers on the seventh grade yearbook. The group dynamic and the responsibilities she assumed would both prove pivotal.

“My yearbook teacher would open up her classroom during lunchtimes,” she says, explaining how the yearbook classroom’s calmer environment with a small group of student photographers, copywriters and designers led to tight-knit friendships. “I learned so much from all my upperclassmen during that year that I became editor-in-chief of my middle school yearbook my eighth-grade year, and I continued being on the executive board for yearbook into high school.”

There was a reason she remained motivated to vigilantly capture the history of her classmates.

“I wanted everyone’s voice to be heard in my yearbook; there were 3,000 students at my school, and I wanted every single person represented on the page,” she says, joking that she basically lived at her high school. “I was constantly covering events, even if I wasn’t involved. I was there with the camera, every basketball game, every show that the drama department put on, every speaker event that someone brought to the school. I just really loved being that person who could help other voices be heard, and I’ve continued trying to be that person up into college.”

Andreas had an early start learning how to bring people together. As the product of a school system heavily populated with children from military families, she had fleeting relationships with classmates.

“Every year, I was making new friends and having to adjust because so many military kids would be moving,” she says. “That helped me become good at meeting people and talking to people just because I got really used to making new friends every year.”

Eventually, with the onset of the pandemic, she had to finish high school from home. By the time she applied and enrolled at the University, COVID was still hanging heavy over the world. Unsure of where her studies would take her, she jumped into Intro to Programming, Spanish, and Foundations of Commerce. The Comm course was the only class she had in person, and it really resonated with the former Future Business Leaders of America member.

“I just fell in love with it. I loved talking about the different business cases with my discussion leader, Maggie Regnery (McIntire ’22). She was a third-year in McIntire at the time and really tried to make sure our discussion emulated what she went through and the Integrated Core the previous year. I really appreciated her, I really enjoyed COMM 1800, and I ended up taking more business classes,” says the IT concentrator, who is completing a Business Analytics Track as well as a Computer Science minor.

More Ways to Connect

Let’s get back to that first tour of Grounds Andreas took.

Her introduction to UVA student life and what it offers began by hearing about The Virginia No Tones, “the oldest and only a cappella group for the musically inept,” she explains. She was immediately enamored with the idea. “In high school, I wanted to be in choir, I wanted to be in orchestra, and I wanted to do all these musical things, but I don’t have a musical bone in my body.”

Despite her tour guide pointing out the selectivity of a club that requires its members to be both really funny and terrible singers, she was undeterred.

“I said, ‘Trust me. I can be really bad,’” Andreas recalls.

During a Zoom call with the club president, she offered to do whatever it took to get accepted, which resulted in shooting a slightly embarrassing music video that her friends understandably insist on viewing every so often. “That was the first club that I knew I wanted to join at UVA because it’s just such a fun place where you can bring joy to everyone in the group and express yourself. In high school, I put a lot of stress on myself to get straight A’s and to study all the time. Joining this club my first year in college was a little bit of a release for me and somewhere I could have a healthy outlet to just be myself,” she says.

On a more serious note, Andreas is also involved in many diversity-focused clubs on Grounds.

“Coming to UVA was a bit of a culture shock, so finding my space in diversity and affinity groups was really important to me. As I became older, helping underclassmen find their space in my affinity groups was really important too,” she says, noting that she identifies as mixed race and attended one of the commonwealth’s most diverse high schools. “I come from a very diverse background, and I’m also mixed race too, so I feel like even at home, my home life is diverse.”

She’s also been part of the Mixed Race Student Coalition; she was elected to its executive board as a first-year student, and recently completed her final term. The club, which is relatively new, formed in spring 2020, the semester before Andreas came to UVA, has seen a tremendous increase in student participation.

“My first year, during COVID, there were 20 people in the club. Now there are over 100 in our group chat and over 140 on our mailing list. It’s become a lot more active, and I’m really just proud of the growth that’s happened in the three years since I’ve been on board. Part of the growth is creating meaningful connections that will last for a long time.”

Andreas also mentions her dedication to the Chinese Student Association as being instrumental in her UVA experience and helping her connect with her Chinese culture by learning about language, history, traditional dances, cooking meals, and much more. As a former officer and member of the executive board, she’s now a “family head.”

“What that means is that I’m in charge of 150 kids. Luckily, I have like 18 aunts and uncles, and a co-parent who all help when I host events for them,” she says, explaining the enormity of the 300-person group that offers weekly social, cultural, historic, sports-related off-Grounds get-togethers. Third- and fourth-years also routinely cook and offer their younger student peers a place to decompress—as well as important guidance: “My first year, my [Chinese Student Association] family encouraged me to get my Computer Science Minor and encouraged me to learn how to code,” she says. “Now I’m coding all of the time. This club is changing the trajectory of my career in that sense.”

Suddenly Poetry

You wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that Andreas has an incredibly busy schedule, but that hasn’t slowed her down or stopped her from finding more ways to connect and learn from others. In addition to her extensive work in UVA’s Mixed Race Student Coalition, the Chinese Student Association, and The Virginia No Tones, the Comm student has also recently become a highly engaged poet.

“I’ve gotten really involved in the poetry community at UVA in the past year. It wasn’t something that I was searching for or something I even knew I needed,” she says.

Andreas, who is also serves as an RA, had a former resident who studies poetry at the University. Their interactions led to the new creative outlet. Offering ideas for poems to her, Andreas was met with resistance.

“She would keep saying that it was not an idea for her. She said, ‘This sounds like you have an idea for a poem that you should write.’ And I said, ‘I’m not a poet.’ But at the end of my third year fall semester, after telling her I had an idea for a poem for her all semester, I gave in and tried it out,” she says.

On a whim, she took part in McIntire’s Chopra Writing Contest at the start of her writing journey last spring and secured a prize as a top entrant. The achievement was transformative: “That was the moment when I felt like I was a poet for real, that I was going to take it seriously and really try to get to know the poetry community. I started attending Flux, which is the UVA spoken word and poetry club. I go every single Thursday because there’s so much to learn from other people—even if I don’t have something to present that night. I feel like what everyone else is saying is just so inspiring.”

Andreas also points to all that she’s learning from two classes, one with poet Kiki Petrosino and another with poet Lisa Russ Spaar. Both UVA faculty members have been providing her with insightful, exploratory avenues with which to think about herself and the world. “I never thought I would find something like this at UVA, since I’ve always had an analytical mind. I’ve always been concerned with making sure the numbers are right and that the logic’s correct,” she says.

Yet that systematic way of thinking, coupled with her Commerce studies, have motivated her to write a great deal of verse stemming from business-related subjects and issues.

“So many of my poems are inspired by my major in Commerce,” she reveals. “I’ll be reading the Financial Times newsletter every morning in my email, which we have through McIntire. I’ve got an article on Florida’s citrus greening problem, and I wrote a five-poem piece on it and how it’s affecting the community surrounding these orchards,” she says. “I also have a poem I wrote for my workshop last semester about surveillance capitalism. It really connects. Business is something that touches every person. Poetry is something that can touch every person. They overlap a lot.” As she’s preparing to start her career in cybersecurity, she’s even written some pieces in pseudocode, intermingling many of her varied interests.

“I’ve gotten to the point where I’m so comfortable that I’ve gotten accepted into a few high-level poetry seminars for this semester,” she says. “I’ve never seen myself as a pure creative until now. I’m really happy with finding this community at UVA, because it’s just opened up a whole new world to me. I knew that this joy tangent would take me off on a side road, but I love reading and writing poems, and I hope I keep this habit for the rest of my life.”

The spark of joy that Andreas brings with her has also made her grateful for her UVA experiences and the many opportunities she has had because of the connections she’s made through the Comm School.

“I’ve met so many alumni who are really invested in the success of current McIntire students, which I’m so thankful for,” she says. “I don’t think I’d have the job I have today if it weren’t for alumni who are attending those events at McIntire. They’re really making a difference for me.”

As someone who has been making a difference for others, doing so much for so many by ensuring the success of supportive communities, it seems an appropriate outcome for Andreas as she prepares to follow her poetic muse to cyber analysis and wherever life takes her.