Hi! My name is Lily Kempczinski and I am beyond excited and grateful to be a new Baldwin!
I am from a little bit of all over — moving between New York, Toronto, Boston, and Chicago — but I eventually settled at a boarding school in Massachusetts. Though we always seemed to be on the move, I am incredibly lucky to have been tethered to my parents, my brother Jack and our horrifically trained dogs Rosie and Beacon along the way.
In my free time, I love to hike, bake, watch SNL (I’m an Aidy Bryant superfan), knit, listen to podcasts, play squash, read (Trick Mirror is a recent favorite) and spend time with friends.
I have always seen immense growth and found comfort in communities of women that in many ways emulate Baldwin. By growing up around the women in my family, spending summers on all-girls canoeing trips, playing on my high school squash team, and living in boarding school dorms, I have experienced the power of female-driven spaces that drew me to seek out a similar community for myself here at Duke. I feel so fortunate to be a Baldwin Scholar and cannot wait to learn about myself and work to navigate a path through and beyond college.
I have no doubt my answer to “what are you planning to study?” will change tremendously in my first few years at Duke. That being said, I have loved my computer science class, want to explore environmental science and psych, and am also interested in global health! We’ll see how that plays out…
For now, I want to explore all that Duke has to offer and leave certainties for later!