Volunteering on Saturdays for her high school and on weekday afternoons for her former elementary school are all part of what Rehema Kimathi calls a “give-back mentality” that also shaped her leadership roles at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington and shapes her future career goals as an engineer.
“It’s just the way my parents have instilled those values (of giving back) in me,” said Kimathi, a member of Georgetown Visitation’s class of 2025 who is the daughter of Martin and Scolastica Kariithi.
The D.C. resident who is 17 also has two younger sisters, Imani who is 12 and Taraji who is 6, and a younger brother Riziki who is 4. Kimathi was born in Kenya and moved to the United States with her family when she was 3 years old.
When she was a seventh grader at St. Anthony Catholic School in Washington, Kimathi began attending Visitation’s Saturday School program, in which students from that Catholic high school serve as mentors to seventh grade girls from eight participating D.C. middle schools, assisting them with reading and math enrichment and hands-on academic exercises and joining them for fun activities. Then as a Visitation junior and senior, Kimathi volunteered with the Saturday School as a mentor and friend to seventh graders in the program, building a relationship with them.
By the time students graduate from the program, “they’re really showing confidence in themselves,” she said.
Kimathi also volunteers at St. Anthony Catholic School, sometimes helping with after-school activities and assisting with the pre-kindergarten class. She also served as a camp counselor at St. Anthony’s summer camp.
“I’ve really enjoyed going to Catholic school my entire life. I’ve really appreciated the opportunity,” said Kimathi, who attended St. Anthony Catholic School from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade and has attended Visitation all four years. She added, “I’ve grown more appreciative of the fact I can practice my religion at school if I need to, and I can go to the chapel at lunch.”
At Georgetown Visitation, Kimathi served as president of her senior class and also as president of her class as a sophomore. She said serving in those roles helped her learn different leadership styles, develop her communications skills, and be a go-between in her work with students and the school’s administrators.
“It’s been a really good experience, because I got to see our class transitioning from being Visitation students, to where we’ll be after graduation,” she said.
Her favorite school activities at Visitation included participating in the Black Women’s Society there, helping to plan special school assemblies. In her sophomore year, she portrayed Steve Harvey in a “Family Feud” contest featuring students depicting notable Black figures. When she was a junior, the group staged a beauty pageant with students representing different countries, and she represented Kenya, her family’s native country. In her senior year, the group’s assembly highlighted Black artistry and contributions to music.
For the past three years, Kimathi also participated in the Mathletes activity at Visitation.
“The way we describe ourselves, it’s math as a sport, and there’s different competitions in the area,” she said, noting that the math problems students tackle can deal with areas like geometry, algebra, number sequences, and theoretical thinking. “A little bit of everything,” she added.
Explaining her motivation for participating in that group, Kimathi said, “Math is not my strong suit, but I want to be an engineer, so why continue this mentality of ‘I can’t do math’, when I can do something about it and get better.”
At Visitation, Kimathi also participated in the Aerospace Engineering Club and was co-president of that club in her senior year. That group’s activities included sessions on testing gravity, learning about how airplanes are made, reviewing movies about space for their accuracy, and learning about drones.
After graduating from her Catholic high school on June 3, Kimathi plans to attend Howard University and major in mechanical engineering, and someday as an engineer, she hopes to make technology more accessible to disadvantaged populations, sparked by disparities she saw when she joined her family in returning to Kenya in 2021. That is another way she can give back.
Attending Visitation, she said, helped her learn to “dive in with both feet. It’s okay to make mistakes. Be confident in who you are and who you will become. Everyone is on their own path.”
And she will take to heart the Salesian spirituality that is central to the school sponsored by the Sisters of the Visitation. “Something Visitation has fostered in me is viewing Jesus as a friend and having a personal relationship with him,” she said.
