As a member of the rowing team, Meiss trains 20 hours per week, with her days starting at 4:30 a.m. Planning ahead is critical. If an assignment has a deadline, she’ll aim to get it done 24 hours ahead of time in case anything goes wrong. Staying up until midnight isn’t an option when the alarm goes off before the sun rises. 

“Most of my time is spent rowing or studying, but I just enjoy it,” she said. 

Indeed, she plans to continue both rowing and learning for the rest of her life. After graduation, Meiss plans to go back to Germany and start a master’s program in cognitive science or linguistics in the fall. Fascinated by how humans are able to acquire language, Meiss also earned a Spanish certificate at UD.

“I took Spanish for fun because I couldn’t remember what it was like to learn a language from scratch, and I was interested in seeing the process in my mind of how it goes from not being able to understand anything to being able to fully understand the language,” said Meiss, who started learning English in elementary school. “I was more focused on the syntax of it and how the brain starts to figure out how to learn a language than on learning the language itself.”

Eventually, she’d love to earn a doctorate degree and pursue a career as a researcher or professor.

“I love learning, studying and finding out about new things,” Meiss said. “It’s the curiosity aspect. You cannot lock me up in an office and have me do the same thing every day. I think I would go crazy. But I could do school for the next 10 years, and then at some point, it’s not school anymore, it’s individual research. As a researcher, you keep learning new things, you keep doing new stuff. You will never see the same thing twice.”

While Meiss plans to continue rowing in Germany, either on a university team or as part of a club, she’ll miss her teammates at UD.

“I love my teammates. They have been like family here in the U.S.,” she said. “Being together at 6 a.m., getting out in the boat, seeing the sunrise together, is just beautiful. I have grown so much because of that team.”

Meiss is proud of the grades she earned as a Blue Hen, but her perfect transcript isn't the most important thing she’s taking away from UD.

“Saying this as the high index senior is kind of ironic, but I don’t think grades are the most important thing I take away from Delaware — it’s the things I learned as a person, and how I grew as a person, and not necessarily the A’s,” Meiss said. “Yes, having straight A’s is nice, and it’s going to help you get into grad school or get your first job, but I think if you learn to be a good human being and if you learn to do all the other stuff well, that is actually way more important and is going to have more lasting impact than whether or not you got an A in that class.”