The promise of possibility

It is Commencement week at Mount Holyoke College, and as a graduating senior, I walk with the greatest gift this place has offered me: the promise of possibility. 

Four years ago, I traveled a world away from home to Mount Holyoke in search of something I couldn’t quite name. Like many first-year college students, I was confused, intrigued and excited by what this place might hold for me. Upon arriving, I began to understand what made Mount Holyoke so special: Against all odds, there existed a place where the word “impossible” simply didn’t apply.

You want to be an engineer? Here’s what we can do. Oh, you want to be a designer? Here’s what’s possible. Ah, I see, you want to be both. Totally doable. 

That’s how I became a computer science and architecture double major in my first year, and somehow, Mount Holyoke made room for both parts of me. My journey from there was a peculiar mosaic of intellectual pursuits that I considered impossible, only to be proven otherwise.

As sophomore year rolled around, I went to the Career Development Center to ask questions like “What’s an internship?” With unmatched enthusiasm, I was shepherded toward the myriad of possibilities that awaited me the following summer.

"There’s this thing called Lynk funding," explained Caedyn Busche. It’s basically free money the College gives to students for a summer of hands-on learning. I was ecstatic. 

With the help of Lynk funding, I was able to fund a summer in Boston doing computer hardware research at Harvard University and an AI fellowship at MIT. That summer laid the foundation of my identity as an AI researcher.

Then, junior year rolled around, and I realized that I wanted to be more than just an AI researcher. I wanted to learn how AI systems interacted with existing knowledge systems, and I mean, real old school knowledge systems. That’s how I found myself at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

As a Student Museum Educator, I began to see museums as systems that shape how knowledge is shared; knowledge of makers and their communities. I started to see these systems as vessels of visibility.

As a person who grew up under the shadow of colonialism, I was often faced with the age-old question: Is it possible for traditional knowledge systems like museums to empower both the makers of art and the people who walk through the museum doors? In my conversations with Tricia Paik and Kendra Weisbin, I found that it was indeed possible.

MHCAM is making it possible by rewriting the curatorial rule book. In a departure from the traditional categorization of art by geography, the museum is moving toward a chronological display of art through time. This new strategy allows the true depth of its collection to shine and gives the limelight to art from a more diverse range of communities.

What I learned at the museum handed me the key to my research identity. In the age of rapidly emerging knowledge systems, I started to recognize the importance of intentional curation and narrative control in the design of AI systems. 

By senior year, I began to ask harder questions: Who gets represented in AI systems, and who gets overlooked? What kinds of data are these models trained on, and with whose consent? Is it possible to build AI tools that preserve the identities of the artists within these datasets? 

At Mount Holyoke, I found myself surrounded by people who treated difficult questions not as dead ends but as invitations to think more deeply and build more intentionally. I learned to stop treating impossible questions as impossible. This fall, I’ll continue exploring these questions as a master’s student in computational design at Carnegie Mellon University, carrying with me the greatest gift this place has given me: the belief that possibility is something we create together.