In my formal education and lived experience, I have found that at the root of injustice in this country are inequities in our social and institutional structures, specifically in education, that limit the social mobility and voices of marginalized groups. The widening academic achievement gap between socioeconomic groups in America is contributed to by the disproportionate amount of funding and resources given toward the education of already affluent children. Much of a child’s socialization comes from their educational environment and their social groups within that environment. I believe that a child’s experience of early education, authoritative figures, and peers, play a fundamental role in shaping how an individual engages with society. It is not only an issue of access to education but how we educate. School is not only the environment in which children develop academically, it is also where they build a foundation for self-efficacy and self-actualization. Disproportionately, children born into marginalized communities, especially those of lower socioeconomic status, have incredibly limited access to educational opportunities, extra-curriculars, and advanced-placement courses. Despite only recently being recognized, design has shaped the evolution of our culture and society for centuries as the crossroads between engineering and the humanities. It is both my academic and professional ambition to redesign oppressive systems in education by approaching social issues as systemically engineered structures, approaching problem-solving for social justice by vocalizing the experiences of marginalized individuals and communities as the center of novel solutions. I believe that the problem-solving methodologies of the humanities in cooperation with social engineering are critical in addressing social issues for the betterment of humanity. My integrated degree in engineering, arts, and sciences will allow me to engineer spaces and communities for people to confront and effectively address these issues with designs that enhance human connection and understanding.

Lauryn Hill’s music was one of my earliest exposures to a vocabulary grappling with complex social issues and questioning the vicious holes in our systems that uphold injustice and limit social mobility. I wanted to untangle social inequities the same way Lauryn had by understanding the lived experiences of different groups and rebuilding these broken systems. It wasn’t until I was introduced to Design Thinking through a course I took at Dartmouth College the summer after sophomore year that I began to understand how I could tangibly affect these systems. This was the first time I’d seen humanistic perspectives applied to technical engineering. The marriage of the two proposed a method of systematically zooming in on racially charged systems that limit access to experiences and opportunities for success in society. What this problem-solving methodology offers is a bottom-up approach to design that vocalizes marginalized individuals and communities as the center of design solutions. This course was my first exposure to imagining how to dismantle and redesign social structures, helping me home in on the intersections of issues I care deeply about. As I designed and prototyped models of masks to alleviate the lack of human connection during the pandemic, I became inspired to solve larger social issues, eager to engineer models that would upset hierarchical systems in education that undermine minority groups. This week-long course was only an introduction to these concepts but let me begin to analyze these systems and approach injustice in education from an engineering standpoint, leaving me hungry to apply these problem-solving methods across dysfunctional social systems in education.