Suhirtha Raj Scholarship in Computer Science

The family of Suhirtha Raj established The Suhirtha Raj Scholarship in 2021 to honor the memory of their beloved daughter and sister, who passed away unexpectedly in June 2020 following her junior year as an Illinois Computer Science student.

According to her mother Priya and father Subburaj Raj, Suhi was a ball of energy, creative, compassionate, and a loving young woman.

“She was a special kid and we wanted to honor her legacy of helping others,” said Priya. “She touched many, many lives. We want her legacy to live on in someone else, and this scholarship is one way to do that.”

Suhi loved the arts and trained for nine years as an Indian classical dancer when she was younger. Shortly after graduating high school, she completed the Arangetram, a traditional three-hour debut solo performance showcasing all that she learned over the years. At U of I, she performed with Zindaa UIUC, a non-competitive student dance team that fused hip hop with Bollywood dance routines.

She taught herself calligraphy and how to speak and write Tamil, an ancient language spoken in India and other South Asia countries.

An energetic and gifted instructor, Suhi served as a course assistant for the Introduction to Computer Science (CS 125) class for a year.

She was also passionate about diversity and equal opportunities for all. She conducted a research project with Illinois CS professor Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider, whom she met while taking his Data Structures (CS 225) course. Suhi and two fellow undergraduate students conducted a campus-wide analysis of the diversity of faculty based on the number of sections they taught. They looked at how many times a student saw a woman teaching in the classroom rather than just examining how many women faculty were in each department. The results of their research were released in December 2019.

According to Fagen-Ulmshneider, Suhi was an outstanding student and one of the best researchers in his d7: Illinois Data Science Research Collaborative during 2019.

The summer before her freshman year, she participated in the Women in Engineering (WIE) Orientation program. Later, she served as a mentor to other women engineering students through WIE.