CLASS OF 2026 – The daughter of Turkish immigrant physicians, Maui-raised Alara Berkmen is graduating from USC Viterbi with a bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering on the pre-med track, a business club she built from scratch, and a hard-won clarity about who she wants to be and why.
Growing up on Maui, Hawaii, Alara Berkmen did not look like a future engineer on paper. She was better at English than math, loved music and the arts, and the STEM classes offered at her school were all-male. “I didn’t really want to take those classes,” she says. What she had instead was curiosity, and a garage where she taught herself CAD after school.
Her parents, both physicians who had immigrated from Turkey and completed their medical training in the United States, raised her around hospitals and medical spaces. When a close family friend — a man who had watched her grow up and taught her to kitesurf — was diagnosed with cancer, Berkmen found herself confronting something that on an island like Maui carries a particular weight. “A big thing about cancer is, once you have it, if you have the energy, you go to the mainland to get help,” she says. “Or you just stay and treatments only go so far.” She had a lot of trouble accepting that geography could determine who lived and who died.
That grief pointed her toward biomedical engineering. She took an online course on medical devices, taught herself more CAD, designed a heart stent, and entered it in science fairs all the way to the International Science and Engineering Fair. By the time she was applying to college, she had decided: if a school did not have a biomedical engineering program, she was not applying.
The flexibility that changed everything
What brought her to USC was a question she asked during admissions. “I said, what if I don’t like my major? What if I find something else?” Assistant Dean for undergraduate admissions Paul Ledesma told her that switching to another engineering major would take one form, and switching to another school within USC would take maybe two. “That was what I needed to make a decision,” she says.
That answer went to the top of her pros and cons list. Other schools had emphasized how rigorous and linear their engineering tracks were. USC’s Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering emphasized how interdisciplinary her education would be, and how much it valued life outside the major. The flexibility meant she was never locked in. As it turned out, she stayed in BME and loved it — but the peace of mind that she could leave made all the difference. “It ended up being perfect.” School spirit sealed the deal: the pride she saw in Trojans was unlike anything she had encountered at other schools. “I really liked USC’s mission of the gen eds, and encouraging you to be involved in the student community,” she says. She wanted to be part of it.
The hardest year
Moving from Maui to Los Angeles was overwhelming. Berkmen arrived feeling behind, surrounded by classmates who seemed to have done research in high school or come in with impressive accomplishments. “I always felt like I was in a race in my first year.”
Then, five days before her first college finals, one of her closest friends from home died. They had met in middle school, one of Berkmen’s first friends when she moved to Maui. “I didn’t have a support system here,” she says, her voice quieting. Her roommates did everything they could. Her professors gave her space. “I’m still very grateful for the support I got during that time, because I would have been in a much worse place if I had to power through everything.”
What carried her through was something harder to name. “I wanted to live up to the person that she thought I was,” Berkmen says. “Because she was always so kind. She was so excited for all of us in college. We all had so much to look forward to.” She wanted to do something with her life that would make her friend proud. “There’s a lot of loss in college that people don’t talk about. I can only hope that it changed me for the better.”
Looking back, she is clear-eyed about the feeling of being behind. “I never was behind. I don’t think anyone is really ahead or behind. Everyone has their own path — you can’t look over at someone else’s journey and be like, they’re further ahead, because they’ve inherently come from a different road than you.”
Finding her path, then pivoting
Berkmen came to USC intending to go into the medical device industry. She worked toward it, secured an internship offer, and then realized the patient exposure she was after — one day a year, seeing the people you’re designing for — was not enough. She wanted to be closer.
After the Maui wildfires in her sophomore year, she threw herself into community service, joining the USC Helenes, a co-ed spirit and service organization. Something clicked. “I realized I really want to be in a people-facing role.” She switched to the pre-med track, finished her prerequisites in parallel with her BME degree, and is graduating on time. The confidence to make that leap came slowly. “I applied to my dream program in stem cells and regenerative medicine with no background in stem cells or regenerative medicine,” she says. “All I had to speak on was how excited I was to do it. People believe in that excitement, and they believe in your potential more so than actionable experience.”
Along the way, she found mentors who changed her. Kyung Jung*, her organic chemistry professor, would hold two to four hours of supplemental sessions after class, learning his students’ names and stories. “He knew almost all 200 students by name and by face,” she says. David D’Argenio** in the biomedical engineering department made Berkmen excited about material she never expected to love. “He lights up when he speaks about it. I really see myself in his place in maybe 20 years.” Viterbi, she says, gave her a mentor or a resource at every turn. “You can really be your own person. You’re beyond an engineer. You can be whoever you want to be.”
Berkmen did not just take from her USC experience. She joined the Society of Women Engineers, becoming the mentor she had lacked in high school, and served as a teaching assistant. She also co-founded USC Nexus, a life sciences and business club built around a gap she and co-founder Patrick Nguyen had both noticed: there was no dedicated space at USC bridging biotech, medicine, and business. Starting as the Trojan Bio Business Group, later rebranded as Nexus, the club brought in guest speakers, organized biotech site visits, and ran workshops on case competitions and investment banking. Today it has over 75 active members. Berkmen served as president for two years and is now senior advisor.
A new door, already open
That tension between engineering and medicine — between building the tools and being with the patient — is one USC is now addressing at an institutional level. The recent announcement making the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering a joint department between USC Viterbi and the Keck School of Medicine — one of the first of its kind in California, and timed to the department’s 50th anniversary — means something personal to Berkmen. “It’s going to open so many doors that I kind of had to pry open myself,” she says.
“Not having ties to a human medical facility was something that was always missing, it felt, from my education,” she says. “At the end of the day, we are a medical major. How would this be integrated in a clinic? How would this be adopted by patients? It’s so important to have that tie.” The new structure gives incoming students a clearer path to what Berkmen had to push through alone. “I spent most of my time as an undergraduate looking and searching and asking, constantly knocking on doors that I wasn’t sure were going to be open.” The freshmen she works with, she adds, are already buzzing. “A lot of them are very excited. So am I.”
Bench to bedside, one step at a time
Berkmen is taking two gap years, applying for clinical research coordinator roles along the West Coast. Medicine is the direction; the question she still needs to answer is how much research to pair with it. “Am I going to be MD-PhD, or just a pure MD? The answer I need to find is: do I like clinical research?” She wants to work somewhere in translational medicine, in cancer research. “I’ve identified this gap between the novelty of my work and my classes and my professors, and the actual lived experiences of patients I work with,” she says. “I really want to lessen that gap” — particularly for underrepresented populations who have not had equal representation in clinical research. “Everyone deserves to know,” she says.
Ten to twelve more years of training lie ahead — medical school, residency, fellowship. She does not flinch at the number. “It seems really worth it. I’m really excited for it, honestly.” Asked what her late friend would think of the path she has chosen, she smiles. “Out of everyone,” she says, “she would be the least surprised.”
*Kyung Jung is Associate Professor of Chemistry for USC Dornsife.
**David D’Argenio is Chonette Chair in Biomedical Technology and Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering of USC Viterbi.