Maneet Mehta

My Activities

I have effectively engaged in and led numerous clubs, organizations, and extracurricular activities both within and beyond the school environment. Below are the highlights from my most impactful experiences!

Debate

I served as the Head Captain of Reservoir High School’s Speech and Debate team.

I have helped facilitate statewide debate tournaments and train underclassmen in research and debate skills. I have personally competed in Lincoln-Douglas, Public Forum, Extemporaneous, and Congressional debate. Some of my accolades in these events include: 

  1. 7x National Qualifier across 3 events

  2. LD debate State Champion

  3. NCFL Nationals LD Double-Octofinalist (#17/250+)

  4. NSDA Nationals LD Triple-Octofinalist (#50/250+)

  5. NSDA Honor Society Superior Distinction Degree

  6. NSDA Honor Society Academic All-American

  7. #3 Debater in Maryland (NSDA Ranking)

I’ve also developed a background in different fields of interest while researching various debate topics, a few of which include: International Relations, Healthcare, Climate Policy, Education, Immigration, Criminal Justice, and Space Exploration

DECA

I serve as the Director of the Maryland DECA Outreach Student Task force, and I previously served as the Region 3 Vice President on the Maryland DECA State Officer Team.

As the task force director, I lead a 7 person team responsible for facilitating fundraising and networking initiatives alongside the state executive team.

As the Region 3 VP, I facilitated training and networking events for 1300+ members and 30+ chapters across the state of Maryland. I assisted in planning, marketing, and hosting the 2024 Region 3 conference for over 40 students in Howard County, as well as the 2024 SCDC conference for over 650 Maryland students. I also raised $200+ in revenue and expanded organization membership by 10%.

I also personally compete in Professional Selling, placing as a top 10 International Champion (of over 220k students worldwide) at the 2024 ICDC conference

Robotics

I serve as the Team Captain and Lead Coder of FTC team 5709, based out of Reservoir High School.

In this capacity I've led training initiatives and workshops, assisted fundraising efforts, and spearheaded brainstorming sessions. Most importantly, I've directed the technical development of our team's robot, coordinating mechanical, electrical, software, and auxiliary teams throughout the robot production. I directly lead the software team, writing autonomous computer vision code and driver-controlled TeleOp code in Java (visible on my GitHub). I also drive our robot at competitions.

These efforts have led our team to become 2x Regional Semifinalists during the 2024 season, the highest in our team's history.

JYOC

I serve as the Executive Committee Chair for the Jain Youth Of the Capital, a youth group operating under the Jain Society of Metropolitan Washington (JSMW).

I direct a team of 5 in organizing large youth events for JSWM. I have also directed service events such as:

  • Adopt-A-Road highway cleanups, clearing over 30 bags of trash from Ammendale Road in Montgomery County, Maryland.

  • Canned Food Drives, collecting and donating over 250 food items to the Friends of Sparsh organization.

I also lead JYOC in hosting social and religious events, working to foster a sense of community among Jain youth in the DMV area. These include weekend retreats, provoking debates and discussions, and SkyZone mixers.

ASPIRE

I work as an ASPIRE intern at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. 

My projects and research are outlined further on the projects and research pages linked above. My work focused on 3 primary areas: Machine Learning, Image Classification/Robotics, and Large Language Models.

I conducted a literature review of prompt engineering with LLMs. I built image-classification models. I developed computer vision pipelines for robots. I built a webscraping and RAG pipeline to assist debate research. I am currently working on further AI oriented research.

Scouting

I have served as the Senior Patrol Leader for Scouts BSA Troop 540 based in Fulton, Maryland. Here, I achieved the rank of Eagle Scout.

As the Senior Patrol, I organized weekly troop meetings for 70+ scouts aged 10-18. I orchestrated quarterly Courts of Honor to recognize our troop excellence. I also led biweekly patrol leader councils, where we planned meetings and campouts, ensuring that all logistics were meticulously arranged. I also led multi-day campouts, where I helped train younger scouts in essential skills such as cooking, camping, and first aid.

I was also inducted to the Order of the Arrow.

Research

I currently work as a research intern at the University of Maryland under Dr. Cody Buntain. My research looks at the influence of evocative emotions in AI image generation. Specifically, do AI images contain (on average) more positive/negative imagery? If so, why? What implications might that have on practices for responsible gen AI? I specifically work on creating image classifier pipelines and models to extract discrete emotions from images.

Take a look at some of my projects!

 My Projects