When Aaron Williams ’26 moved to a house in suburban New Jersey that had a pool, his grandfather suggested that he and his 8-year-old twin brother take swimming lessons. So Williams’ parents enrolled the two of them at the local YMCA.

Once they dove in, neither of them ever got out of the water.
As captain of the Lehigh swimming team, a three-time Mountain Hawk record holder, Martindale Scholar, and now fashion scholarship award winner, Williams is leaving most swimmers (and students) in his wake.
Those swim lessons, spurred by a competitive streak between twins, led the brothers to become members of the YMCA club team. Both specialize in sprint freestyle and butterfly. Their success in the pool continued on land, where both excelled academically. Of course, recruiters sought them.
Williams came to Lehigh to swim and study finance and management. But his first year brought common challenges as he balanced the demands of the classroom with the schedule in the natatorium. He relied on his teammates’ advice and guidance and found support as a member of Student Athletes of Color (SAOC).
Those relationships helped cultivate his leadership style as he was named captain of the swim team for his junior and senior year campaigns and serves as co-president of SAOC.

Williams has found success in all areas of life on campus. He owns the 100-yard butterfly record and shares the medley relay record in both the 200 and 400. He is in his second summer as an analyst intern at Exelon, one of the nation's largest utility companies, where he forecasts project budgets and tracks actual spending.
Then there is the $10,000 he won at the 88th annual Fashion Scholarship Gala, where he met his scholarship funder, New York Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns Jr.
That win came from his work in a marketing class taught by Nevena Koukova, associate professor. With her guidance, Williams developed a plan for Speedo to position itself to prevent accidental drownings in underrepresented communities. Williams’ research, strategy, and pitch filled a 21-page slide deck.
Being selected as a scholar put him in the room with major names and influencers in fashion. But meeting Towns was the highlight, and the kicker was scoring courtside Knicks tickets.

Williams hasn’t stopped though. Thanks to a swimming teammate, he learned about and applied to the Martindale Program, where a select group of students explores global business, economic, and social and public policy issues over 15 months.
He just returned from two weeks in Croatia, where the cohort met with business leaders, government officials, and entrepreneurs about a range of issues and topics, from tourism to energy to venture capital.
Williams is now narrowing down a research topic for his two-semester coursework and senior honors project. He also plans to cement his pool record by shaving a few tenths of a second off the time while guiding athletes across campus to dive into the opportunities below every surface at Lehigh.