May Mengyao Zhou was born on July 30, 1983. She attended Mason Elementary School from 1990 to 1995 and Challenger Junior High School from 1995 to 1996. She participated in the Johns Hopkins CTY Talent Search and scored the second highest in the nation on the SAT I.
From 1996 to 2000, May attended La Jolla High School. She had perfect SAT I, SAT II, and AP scores. She was a National Merit Scholar, a National AP Scholar, and a candidate for Presidential Scholar. She was also the president of Math Team and a valedictorian.
Harvard, MIT, Caltech, and UC Berkeley all accepted her. May chose MIT, where she studied from 2000 to 2005. She was a member of the sorority Kappa Alpha Theta, a Student Ambassador, and a news reporter for The Tech, a MIT student newspaper. In 2002, she received the Paul E. Gray Endowed Fund Research Grant. A year later, she was initiated in Eta Kappa Nu and Tau Beta Pi, two engineering societies. In 2004, she received MIT’s VI-A Fellowship, and she completed her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, with a Minor in Economics. In 2005, she obtained her Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. May invented three patents and finished her Master’s thesis at Qualcomm. She had perfect GRE General scores.
After graduating from MIT, May went to Stanford University with a three-year Stanford Graduate Fellowship to continue her education in Electrical Engineering. She passed the PhD Qualifying Exams with high marks on her first try.
May was highly motivated and optimistic about her future; she saw a direct relationship between hard work and success and believed no obstacle to be insurmountable. Though her studies were time-consuming, she was always ready to socialize with friends and family, whether the activity was a simple dinner or a jaunt to New York City.
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