The years were formative in ways that shaped her interests as a Princeton undergraduate and that continue to take her abroad.
Eckholm, who wrote her senior thesis on the effect of monuments on reconstructing national identity in post-communist Eastern Europe, received a grant from National Geographic’s Young Explorers program to study the post-war rebuilding of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, after graduation. She led an expedition to the region to create content for National Geographic's media outlets and worked closely with a photographer to help illustrate the stories.
Following her project with National Geographic, Eckholm began working in Copenhagen, Denmark, for ReD Associates, a strategy consultancy that uses methods from the human sciences to understand business problems. She travels the world studying big phenomenological questions like “What is the future of play?” for companies ranging from LEGO to Adidas to Samsung.
One of Eckholm’s main passions is debating. In her senior year in high school, she competed with a five-person national team representing the United States in the World Schools Debating Championship in Qatar. She also competed in Bulgaria and Bosnia in tournaments sponsored by a subsidiary of philanthropist George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Eckholm later worked for Soros’ foundation as an independent consultant.
At Princeton, she has debated in the Philippines and in Oxford, England, for world championship events. She has spent a year as president of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, an organization with a rich history dating back to James Madison’s day as an undergraduate debater. Her duties have included budgeting and organizing events for the society and its subsidiaries, including the Princeton Debate Panel, Mock Trial, Princeton Model Congress and the International Relations Council. She also has arranged speaking engagements for several luminaries, including author Walter Isaacson and The New York Times education report Jacques Steinberg. During her tenure, Whig Clio grew to more than 500 members, making it the largest student organization on campus.
“As a sophomore, I had an office in this amazing building,” she says of her Whig-Clio tenure. “I noticed one day that we had a basement area that was filled with artifacts that seemingly nobody had touched in years. I spent a week between reunions and my exams searching through it to see what was down there.”
What she discovered were lost pieces of history, including a letter she believes was signed by Thomas Jefferson, a note from a pope declining an invitation to speak at the University, and photos of presidents Kennedy, Clinton and others. She worked with the Princeton Art Museum to curate and preserve the articles, which are now hanging in a first-floor museum at Whig Hall.
Eckholm recommends Princeton to anyone interested in her passions — politics, international relations, debate and service. For her, all roads have led to Princeton.