“Do good science, and the rest will follow,” Mia de los Reyes said.

The quote is projected on the screen behind her as her audience files into the room, ready to hear her talk about her research in astrophysics. She has taken it from her dad, a big influence in her life, and it is fitting advice for her. This is fitting advice for any science major, but de los Reyes realizes that the students sitting before her in the West Wing Auditorium of D.H. Hill Library are a diverse group. She does not want the advice she gives to be limited to one type of student, and so she begins her talk with a revision that makes it more accessible.

 “Do something you think is cool, and the rest will follow,” de los Reyes said.

Her audience is rapt. De los Reyes is the first NC State student to win the prestigious Churchill Scholarship, which will cover the costs of completing a research-based master’s program over the course of the next year at the University of Cambridge, and she will be continuing her research in astrophysics once there. It is a high honor, but she says that she does not want to bore everyone with a lofty lecture on this field.

She explains that she has acquired a tried-and-true process for reaching success that she feels is applicable to every person in the room, and she gives her audience the option of hearing about this topic instead. It is overwhelmingly popular, and she smiles as she elaborates. The steps of her process are vague: Find something you think is cool, do it, do it well, make yourself sound good, rinse and repeat. It is her own experiences that give them some clarity.

“My dad is a university professor,” de los Reyes said. “And I’m pretty sure I was conditioned for research.”

She goes on to credit both of her parents with influencing her decision to pursue a position in research, giving her glow-in-the-dark stars to stick to her bedroom ceiling and encouraging her to learn something new every day.

“My parents taught me to read really early, and that was good because science is a lot of communication,” de los Reyes said. “My mom would have me look up topics I was interested in and write about them on Microsoft Word. After a while, my teachers had more papers than they knew what to do with.”

But it wasn’t until a high school trip to Geneva, Switzerland, however, that this broad interest in conducting research funneled down into a love for physics. She displays a picture of herself, as she puts it, an embarrassing high school student on a senior class trip to CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and said that this is when she realized she had found something cool.

“It took a while before I could actually do it, though,” de los Reyes said.

CERN turned her down the first time she applied, and it was John Hopkins University that wound up being the place where she first got her opportunity to do physics, and to do physics well. She interned as a research assistant there in the summer of 2013 and found it to be an invaluable experience.

“John Hopkins had a huge variety of topics that I hadn’t even heard of,” de los Reyes said. “This experience was the first time I had really been exposed to it. I had great advisers there.”

These advisers helped her with a publication in The Astronomical Journal, a research journal in which she was listed as first author despite the fact that most interns are often listed as the third or fourth author behind their advisers. Reyes had made herself sound good, and CERN offered her an internship in Switzerland for the next two summers.

“I felt like an enthusiastic puppy,” de los Reyes said. “There were interns from all over the world, and it was cool to be surrounded by so many cultures.”

But the excitement wore off the second summer. According to de los Reyes, the experiments that CERN conducts have upward of 1,000 people working on them together, and even the smallest experiments have about 100. Still, she claims this international experience had a huge role in helping her pursue and win the Churchill Scholarship, where she will rinse and repeat this physics research later on this month with more independence.

“Networking had become more important than the physics,” de los Reyes said. “Collaboration is not for me. I wanted freedom and independence as a scientist.”

This is what de los Reyes has to look forward to at the University of Cambridge, but in looking back she realizes that she will miss the people she has met here at NC State. She says that without her strong women mentors, she might not have made it through the physics program, and she gives a shoutout to her mom and her favorite professors. And de los Reyes has earned a good deal of respect herself during these last four years. Tiffany Kershner, coordinator for distinguished scholarships and fellowships at NC State, who advised Reyes on the Churchill application process, is confident that she will go far.

“She has incredible drive and passion for her area of research,” Kershner said. “She will undoubtedly make strong contributions to the fields of astronomy and astrophysics.”

In five years, de los Reyes says she will be pursuing her doctorate at the California Institute of Technology. She has to pause and consider where she might be in 10 years, however. After this length of time, the future is a little more unclear, and she laughs apologetically. Accessibility is a theme not just of her talk, but of her character as well.

“There are so many ways to keep pushing,” de los Reyes said with a smile. “That’s what I like about research.”

A version of this article appeared in print on Sept., 19, 2016, on page 9 with the headline: “Churchill scholar talks success.”