President's Award winner Faith Massey with President Jon Alger. Photo by Jeff Watts. 

When Faith Massey, CAS/BA ’25, arrived at American University she had to learn to ask herself: Why not me?

“Having a mustard seed of faith will propel you the furthest because you truly don’t know where you can go,” said Massey, winner of the 2025 President’s Award—AU’s highest undergraduate award. “You’ve got to be willing to bet on yourself. If you’re going to ask other people to bet on you and invest in you, you should be doing that first.”

The sociology major made the most of her AU experience, notching an impressive list of accomplishments that embody the President’s Award: academic achievement, selflessness, leadership, and service to the DC community.

Massey, who served as a Congressional Black Caucus Foundation intern for Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) this spring, earned the 2023–25 Obama-Chesky Voyager Scholarship for Public Service. Through that experience, she spent last summer at the Faith and Politics Institute’s John Robert Lewis Scholars and Fellows Program and at Harvard’s Junior Summer Institute in Public Policy and International Affairs.

Massey also traveled to Ghana last summer to research how the transcontinental slave trade contributed to today’s systems of oppression and to research and report on accessibility issues for differently abled students in the small coastal village of Nsawam Adoagyiri; she studied data science and applied statistics through Georgetown’s SPIRAL/SPATIAL summer research experience and started her own nail business, Faith.NailedIt.

“Faith embodies the Eagle spirit with her passion for service and her ceaseless drive to help others and make the world better,” said AU president Jon Alger. “She has truly made the most of her time here at American University and left an indelible mark on this community. I look forward to seeing where her big dreams take her next and have no doubt that she will continue to have incredible impact.”

Despite her accomplishments, Massey said she didn’t always have it all figured out.

“I want people to understand when they see all the accolades, [they’re] only seeing the pretty side,” she said.

Four years ago, Massey arrived on campus knowing no one. “Not a soul,” she said. “It was me and Jesus.” Her first year, she worked three jobs on top of her studies to make ends meet. At the same time, she grappled with what the advocacy work she began in high school would look like going forward.  

After moving from a predominantly Black neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee, to the Chicago suburbs in 2019, Massey cofounded the first Afrocentric student organization, Black Leader Achievers, at James B. Conant High School. She also hosted the district’s inaugural Black History Month event and, at age 17, started a nonprofit, Sharing Our Voices, to distribute diverse literature to low-income communities.

“In my city, people knew me for being a public servant,” Massey said. “In DC, everybody wants to be president, and everybody does public service. That first year was not only working hard inside and outside the classroom but also exploring who Faith is outside of these titles.”

Through that soul-searching, Massey defined her purpose and learned she had a deep commitment to serving her community. Through sociology, she fell in love with research and how the field’s analytical lens shines a light on systemic problems and helped her understand her own lived experiences.

While she’s still plotting her next steps, Massey aspires to become the first person in her family to earn a PhD and continue studying policies that disproportionately affect the Black community.

She is proud to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Celia Massey, who was the first in her family to go to college and earned her master’s degree, and her grandmother, Ernestine Moore, who went back to school at age 50 after raising four children.  

“It’s an honor to have the president and the institution acknowledge all the hard work that I’ve done and the impact that I’ve had,” Massey said.  “I’m just honored to be able to show other people that if I did it, you can do it too.”