As Miss Cambridge, Samantha serves as a positive role model for youth and an ambassador for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals. She travels throughout Massachusetts as a representative of the Miss Boston/Cambridge Scholarship Organization and Miss Massachusetts Scholarship Organization raising money for local charities, performing her talent, and speaking at community events. 

Samantha's mission is to raise awareness and funding for her personal platform of "Alleviating the Effects of Poverty through Volunteering." Poverty is a cause Samantha has chosen to champion not just in her personal life, but in her professional life as well. As a researcher at Harvard University studying poverty and violence in urban America, and as Miss Cambridge, she works to raise awareness about the consequences of poverty and advocate for populations whose plight is all too easily ignored.

Volunteerism is at the cornerstone of Samantha's grassroots advocacy and activism. Samantha is a weekly volunteer at Housing Families, a non-profit organization serving homeless families and children in the Greater Boston area. There, she tutors youth and co-teaches the Raising a Reader program, a course which teaches parents dialogic readings skills that will strengthen their child's school-home connection and improve reading ability. Samantha is also involved with On the Move in Cambridge where she is collecting donations of household items to ease the transition of homeless women into permanent homes. Previously, Samantha has served as a weekly volunteer at the St. Francis Neighborhood Center, a community center in the Reservoir Hill neighborhood of Baltimore City, where she was involved in helping low-income families. She established the Food Resource Program which is a free program in Reservoir Hill to provide a monthly free bag of groceries to needy families. This program has expanded since its conception and still exists today. Samantha is beginning to embark on a state-wide campaign to expand the Food Resource Program to serve other impoverished communities throughout the state.

Samantha is a doctoral student at Harvard University in sociocultural anthropology. Her research interests include: Inner-city America, poverty, violence, visual methods, social control, and memorialization. Samantha is a magna cum laude graduate of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). At UMBC, she completed a two Bachelor's degrees, the first in Cultural Anthropology and the second in Interdisciplinary Studies - Visual Research Methodology, a major that she personally designed. She graduated with a minor in Art History and an Honors certificate. She is a Maryland Delegate Scholar and a recipient of the Walter Sondheim Jr. Nonprofit Leadership Scholarship, among other academic scholarships. In 2012 and 2013 Samantha was awarded the Miss America Academic Award. 

During her time at UMBC, Samantha pursued numerous internships at: The Maryland State Arts Council's Maryland Traditions, Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, and the National Geographic Society. Samantha has continued her time at National Geographic's Image Collection beyond her internship and now works there part-time as a paid contractor! During her time interning with Maryland Traditions, Samantha was awarded a Governor's Citation for the exemplary contributions that she made to the non-profit community.