Anika grew up on Mercer Island and attended a small private high school in Bellevue. She enjoyed the extracurriculars of swing dance, theater, and a creative writers club. Outside of school, Anika was a girl scout (one that still proudly carries her lifelong membership card), and a member of The Northwest Girl Choir, where she nurtured her love of music and singing. Upon graduating high school in 2011, Anika made her way to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she began her undergraduate studies in Cognitive Science. Anika was a volunteer research assistant throughout college. She enjoyed the challenge and creativity of finding and testing new hypotheses with her academic mentor and her love for math and data analysis fit well with the process of interpreting the testing results. Anika was a member of the Glee Club and Delta Omicron Tau sorority outside of her academic life. She graduated magna cum laude in 2015 with departmental honors and double minors in vocal performance and neuroscience.

Anika moved back to Seattle the following summer. She spent time working in retail while deciding whether to pursue graduate school in Occupational therapy, a dream she had since she was thirteen. She had been inspired by her OT and the positive impact of that work on her life. She applied and was accepted to the Masters in OT program at the University of Southern California and returned to Los Angeles in the fall of 2016 to begin her studies. She graduated with her masters in 2018 and became licensed in January of 2019. Upon joining the workforce, Anika found her experiential knowledge of the positive impact therapy can have was a double-edged sword. While it initially inspired her to pursue the path, it also created intense pressure and a strict sense of all-consuming duty that was untenable to continue. What had seemed a clearly defined and expected destination shifted to an unknowable one that Anika faced well prepared with the skills and knowledge gained from all of her education and experience.

Early this year, Anika began working two part-time jobs to explore a few different work options. She subsequently accepted and will start a new full-time position in early September as a leasing associate at a Seattle apartment complex. Anika is excited about the opportunity and, despite being a self-proclaimed planner, she does not know what the future holds. Anika continues to grow her knowledge of data and programming in her spare time. When she isn’t working or buried in a programming book, you may find her at a boxing class, enjoying action movies with her boyfriend, or cooking up a gourmet meal in the kitchen.