 Just kidding, are we good? So hello, everyone. Welcome to these math and senior presentations. My name is Nathaniel, and I'm an external presentation with my own development in the past four years, which I'm essentially as the title of the presentation, something that I'm thinking about that really does embody the past four years of my work here at Tufts, and I'm currently calling it the Ethics of Ethnography. So ethnography is the term used in social sciences meet as a form of research or methodology research based on talking to people through conversation and through interview, and so I'll tell you a little bit about how I got here and my name by the Ethics, especially ethnography. And ultimately, this application of ethnography and of what I'm talking about is a relation to medicine or care or illness and health. That's something that's gotta be in the past four years. So especially why do stories and why do we tell stories matter and how we provide care? So my freshman year, I piloted this campaign called Take What You Need to Claim. I started at Tufts, and then I went to Boston into two sort of art sites and was posting and posturing these posters. And so two things that are important here are the types of things that I'm, one is the types of things that I was asking people to talk about or to take. So I was having those and being them sort of with Terry Strip, they'd walk by, they'd see it maybe, and they'd think about it and they'd grab something. And the ones that were always taken were Forgiveness and Confidence, and the second thing that I wanna know is the name of this take, what you need, so this take, you know. Well, what I realized how to do this project, so it worked really well, people were taking tabs. I never talked to people with their stories. I watched them sit post, then sit for six hours somewhere and watch people come by and grab stuff, but I would never engage with people. And the first thing I learned about this was that I didn't do anything needed. So I was asking people to stop and interact, to stop and do something with their time to think about what they need. And I was seeking confirmation about them, but I was never doing anything with that. And I think that as I started moving on, I kind of felt we were, I never knew what the next step of this project was. I just knew that I was asking people to review something for themselves, right? To publicly say, I need forgiveness in my life. I need confidence in my life. I need to say that publicly meant something. And I said, how do I take this seriously? And so I put that in the back burner. So this was the campaign from my question here. And I was inspired, I think it was by Allison, if I understand that, who loves to read photos. I said, what do you do that she writes about? She's highlighting each one's thing about the space that you're occupying. I said, in the very similar way I did this, but I was asking and taking information from people. So I want to leave this slide for people to have an idea of taking information. Then our sophomore year, we worked together to try and put on that collection of talks which we call fireside chats. One of them was a professor who was obsessed with death and her own death, her own mortality. So I was trying to talk with death and my friends. And this was the first time I said then, like if I take information, how about we make, it's a collection of people in conversation to each other. That was the whole goal, was that it was not someone talking at someone, but it was sharing information, right? So it was no longer about taking away or just taking notes or taking observations about other people, or people collectively taking something together. Which I really, really appreciate. I started thinking about this. So parallel to this time, I started taking medical anthropology. Anthropology is the discipline, is the study of humans and everything that humans do. Anything can be anthropology. But specifically medical anthropology. And I wrote an illness narrative, which is not, it wasn't a paper, but it was asking to talk to me about illness. And in her life, we talked about insomnia and the inability to sleep, what that meant as a mother. So she told me the story of, before she was a mother, she remember sleeping really, really well. She slept deep. She felt refreshed in the morning. But the moment she became a mother, any cry in the night will break. That seems biologically necessary. Like if your baby's crying, there's something probably wrong you could go. Normally though, you lose that over time. Like once your parents, once you get older, once your kid is in there 20, 30, so you probably biologically stop. There's a biological mechanism that is supposed to make you need or to sleep a little bit deeper. And she lacks that. So she talked to her doctor and the only way that she could sleep was on medication. And what happens is that she, her brain light blacks out. So there's no dreaming. It's like her brain just shuts down and she gets sleep. So she's physically rested every morning, but she's emotionally not satisfied. She still is exhausted emotionally. And so in conversation with this, I started to think about, what is the dialogue? So then I started these conversations out by asking her, having learned my lesson from this, asking her very seriously, what do you want to get out of poverty? This was on a time of her class though. I wanted information from her, but there was an ethic of saying, what am I supposed to do with this information? And I encourage you in your lives as you move forward to ask that as well. Of the communities that you work with, not to take, but also to give back something. And hers was, I want a better understanding of myself. Am I weird for doing this? I want to understand, is there an alternative treatment? So that's how we went about that. So that was another topic. So around this time I moved, I took my first relationship and I was working at the South End Community Health Center. There was really women's health at the time and so I worked in an emography. The way that South End takes care of this is that, so A, as a federally qualified health center, most of their patients are low income. Specific to the center, most of them are, most patients are Spanish speaking. I'll show a slide about that in a second. But how they have their patients get screened is that a digital emargy technology comes to the center on a emargy band and people will get screened there at the center. Benefits were that people didn't have a waste time being transported into the city. But the problem with the center is that they had alarmingly low rates. They had a failing rating and they were gonna lose funding if they didn't do something with that. And so instead of asking the physicians or asking them else, I went straight to patients, I went to the patient records, literally called patients and said, hi, you had an appointment, why did you miss it? And my favorite answer was, I didn't know I had an appointment. That's not a weird, right? You probably would know if you had an appointment. That makes sense, right? That's like the only thing you need to know is when and where it's at. And so I figured this out. Wow, the number's transferred. Anyway, the biggest one is that 68% of their patient population spoke Spanish as their first language as their only language. And so the way that referrals are made to the way that you book an appointment for a screening memorandum still is that the doctor says you need it. You go outside to a patient coordinator. They acknowledge that you need it. They collect your information about when you're available. They'll call a hospital or the services that deliver the memorandum. They'll book an appointment. That person will call you back, leave a message and assume that you get to the appointment. That's four calls. Most of Boston services are offered in English. When your primary language is Spanish, but that's like a logistical breakdown. But I thought about this in two ways. When I was calling women, in the chart it tells them what their primary language is. That's what I called them. And I asked, why are you missing, right? I started the very first question is, hi, you had an appointment. And then the first question I asked is, why did you miss your appointment? I didn't say, I tried to be a little bit more old-ended about this. And what I realized is that if you let people tell you other things that they said were, I don't feel comfortable searching for cancer. I don't like that idea. In my community, I feel like I'm looking for cancer, I'm looking for bad news. Or it sounds really expensive and painful and scary. I know for my sister and my aunt that I don't like that it's uncomfortable. Or I can't really afford that right now. Even though a mammogram is never my most appearances. And what I'd learned was that, for the Spanish, what shifted in my mind then was how do you articulate to your provider what you need when you can't communicate? How do you tell your own story? Before, yeah, I understand I need a mammogram, but I can't take time off work. Or I don't feel comfortable getting straight. Or I can't physically afford that. Or you can't. And so language as a lens, not just as logistics of speaking, but how do you tell to the world what you need and what you want? So ethnography based on an interview is about conversation with dialogue. You need language. And so I moved on one more step. And I started working for Dana-Farber itself. So Dana-Farber was the company that was bringing the technology to these community health centers. And I said, more broadly then, how do we talk about healthcare in general? And how do we talk about stories in healthcare? And so what we ultimately realized is in Boston, Boston is a pretty good job at screening people. Overall, the city-wide screening rate is somewhere between 83 and 88% depending on the region demographic, which beats the national average of 69 to 72% rose and fall at all. I can cite that because I just published or I'm publishing it right now on that. So 69 to 72% of, depending on the study depending on the year, is the national average for screening. So Boston is doing a pretty good job, right? But what about the 80th, so if 88% are being screened, 12% are not being screened, how do we reach that? What's happening in Boston that leaves us needing more average there? And so that's Dana Farber. I took all these stories that were really meaningful to me, my own personal life. I took stories that I learned in class. I talked, the way we talk about stories, the way we tell stories, the way we frame stories. And I thought here, Dana Farber, what we decided to do was to make a training program based on community members. That it was rather than us saying, you need to get screened and me going to a community center, like exactly here and saying, hi, let me tell you about why you should get screened, breast cancer. We started a training program that gave women the tools and the knowledge and the skills and the practice to go out and do that themselves. So I realized, if you let people tell you what they need, rather than telling people what they need, you're gonna do a lot better job at that reach. And so that's where we are right now in my professional life is we're working on designing these trainings. But remember the story of this is ethics of ethnography. So why, how these stories matter in medicine and why should they matter? And this takes me to the next chapter. So parallel to my time at Dana Farber, I started working on my own senior capstone and it started having a Jack group on growing up in the New American and clear. And so to better understand my own history as a New American person, I started to ask the family members, I asked them stories. And keeping in mind what I was about to ask, I asked people what they were willing to share and what they wanted me to do. So I'll share two stories from this one. So the first story is about my parents. My parents were born in Vietnam. My dad from countryside then moved to a big city. His father joined a military and that's eventually his connection to how he got to the United States. My mom was born in the city of Saigon. She lived there until she was 15. She left Vietnam when she was 15 and arrived in the United States. That's basically what I knew about my family before I talked and I'm too much about this. My dad tells me he left on a plane. He's the child of a colonel and so they were taken. So the Americans were willing to help and airlift him out and he came here with his brother. Do you guys have any questions for me? Can you tell us about what you're gonna do now? Where are you gonna go? Yes, so I am thinking about two things right now in my life. Two big idea clusters and how you move through them in the world. So one question is about diaspora and religions. So in relation to the caps when I just finished, a new question I'm asking is, are my parents part of the diaspora? Now does anyone have a definition for diaspora so far? Or how do you use diaspora? If you use it in a paper or a sentence, maybe a book. Yeah? People who don't live in there, there's a word for it. Correct, well that's one very correct answer and that's the way that I took it. But I had not been told that as in school. So up until the age of 22, I had never used the word diaspora. I had never said it out loud or had I written it in a paper. I had read it and had only read it. But I had never said it out loud and I had never written it anywhere. And it only ever been said to me in the context of slavery to be taken out from your home as you drop somewhere. So I looked at the origins of the word diaspora and it comes from dia and spherin. From the Greek meaning across and spread. To be spread across the world. There are no indications of whether you're taken or you're forced out. So I thought about the context of my parents and so I'm trying to think more critically about this in my own personal writing. So this is one of the two projects that I do in my life. Is for my parents who are, my mom went to a French school and spoke French, English, and English. She was let and her father worked for an American company. So her ability to come to the United States was predicated on the fact that she was a simile. And that she was best or most likely most socially capital, or had the most social capital to offer out of 11 million people in the country. Like why her, why her family? And my father is a son of a colonel, also very well-educated. So then leaving, then being political refugees is one way to articulate that. But they also, they had the choice to not leave. And I have other families of members who chose to not leave. But that choice to not leave is not always a choice. Sometimes they should, or condemn it should be condemned. So what does that mean? So what does diaspora mean to my parents in the big context? And their choice for inability to choose their age at the time. And then my relationship to that is that, is Vietnam my home or is the United States my home? Do I have another place that I can go home to? And right now at this moment I say nationally, I've only ever known myself as an American. So that's one thing in my writing that I'm not new to. And I hope to understand that a little bit better when I start reading and going abroad. The other big work going to PhD program, I'm an apologist, or I train here at Tufts and what I go to later on. And that is on how, so right now it's kind of two pronged, one pronged is on, so in 2013 and 14, I just need to pass legislation that made the idea available to everyone and free to the state regardless of sexual orientation or marital status. So happy, healthy home as a gay or queer person in Argentina regardless of the two factors is what you have a child. You probably can partner in a child. That's great for Argentina. But what about the opposite side of that? So as I began reading about this and doing preliminary research, I also learned that for mental health diagnoses, certain mental health diagnoses preclude you from being allowed to have IVF treatments performed so that you can't have them. What is IVF? In vitro fertilization, sorry. So, or any of these assisted reproductive therapies, but it precludes you from getting benefits of the states and the state won't sponsor you. If you have certain diagnoses, they won't allow you to have this right. That's constitutionally now in their constitution. And so what does that look like for a person? And let me clarify that mental health diagnoses are disproportionate among us, BT communities, but also disproportionate among people of color. And when you overlap those two, what does that look like? In the context of arch, you know, it gets a little bit complicated, but I'm looking at people who are at fridges who live on the opposite side of that then who are constrained and or withdrawn or reclusive either by themselves or by structures that are put on them and how they navigate that. So, yeah, it's here I'll be going through a PhD and a PhD program at Rice University in mental health apology, and I'm taking a leap of absence to do some research in Argentina. All right. But thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you so much for being here. Let me see if I can do the clicking somewhere. Okay, yeah, I'll try to. Hi everyone, I'm Kian, and I'm presenting my senior final presentation is one of those things that I got to do for fun and I'm really excited to share with you. I've titled it, Playing with Boundaries. It's from one of the line that I really enjoyed. Don't play with theme boundaries, play with boundaries. And I also subtitled it, Queen 201, I think it's an advanced version of what it needs to be like me. So, I know you're not in for a lecture, but maybe you're trying to make a lecture fun. So this is the game plan. This is my hope for you. I always hope that you think I'm crazy. This should be easy. You too can believe that I'm a crazy school. It should inspire you to be a little bit crazier. That's harder, and then hopefully, I hope that you leave it today through the way you are leaving more importantly. And also being a signed guy, I like to start with a good definition. So this is, I should define as I'm crazy. It's stand one, being in a way that you cannot imagine yourself being. That's my definition number one. And then two, is making your shell shake your head in disbelief. So that's also another definition of crazy. So let's see, keep that in mind. You see even how far we hold this game. So you gotta be the judge. So on paper, I came to task four years ago with the plan to be computer signed a philosophy major. I really got into the first intro class in comp science philosophy, but really did. And then as you can see on the right side, this is an image that one of my close friends drew for me if you speak a bit of computer signed language. It just means a clear point, like I'm becoming more like myself. My point depending on, it's the infinite loops in computer science that very much capture who I was four years ago, three years ago, three years ago. Maybe different now. Now I'm a computer science student on paper and I tell people that I do philosophy. I don't have qualification, I don't really care. I don't really ask. I don't really ask. Okay, so on doodle, this is how I describe myself. A part of me is a creative guy and I try to ask myself the question of what wants to be born from inside. And then the other side, me, the changemaker guy. What needs to be created in the world and very much of trying to do things in the world. But you know, all in all, I've been thinking about that for a long time and I'm very much of a questioner. And so I know I use games and all that. I think they're my huge game of the heart. Still very much of a game. I don't play video games anymore, but I play the games of life. I hope I'm leveling up. So this is an example of my side project, my creative side. I wrote a weekly digest. I've been doing it for about two and a half years, almost three years now. I started sophomore year, some of you are there, some of you are not there yet. I encourage you to check it out. Every week I send out a newsletter with a bunch of thoughts and usually it's quite, people have said it's quite tough for working. People overseas also say it's a good way to keep in touch with me and what's happening. And it has been going very well and I'm very happy with the people who have been part of it. So that is an example of a creative side of the other stuff. This is on the changemaking side. This is a collaboration project with a few good people, one of them is Julie, who's here. OpenCo, we started last November, it's a community experiment and we bring in a lot of people from different places on campus to be together in Downhill to form meaningful connections to share novel experience. And we have had 17 events so far, every week, some of you have been there. It's kind of hard to describe. But usually people usually leave feeling like they have made some kind of connection with people. She's really nice. Beautiful space, beautiful people, something that I'm quite proud of. Along the line about making change and bringing people together, something that I really love. Personally, I did do a few friends bringing together friends, people from different perspectives, especially in the time where we felt that there's a lot of polarizing opinions on campus and in the world, our effort to bring in people together was, we thought it was a very important work to be done and we did it. I think some of you might have been there and we hope that the impact is starting to spread in the next year. I really want to go too much in my project because I think the learnings that come out even for my journey, that thing would be more relevant to me. So, I'm going to talk about just a bunch of failures that I have over the past four years. There's quite a lot. I try a lot of stuff and I do fail a lot. As you can see, I break down into a few categories. Failure in heartbreaks, failure in class, failure in clubs, failure in work, failure in relationships, failure in my own expectations. There's a lot of failures and I can go into one by one to share with you a bit more inside about what they are and what I have learned. So, first is failure in class. I have been one of my, I've grown up thinking that I'm a good student and it's a very useful and important identity to the point where, you know, we are still students if you want to be a good student. I've realized that that's no longer enough to be a citizen in the world to keep the mindset of being a good student. What does that mean? You need to get good creativity to satisfy a professor. And I thought about just, not really, let's play within the boundary. The boundary is at a good student and you play within it. That's not cool. The boundary is trying to test my own boundary. What it felt like to not be a good student anymore. So, I tried to fail class. And I very intentionally failed it. It's not like I'm too busy that I failed the class. I have some time, but I'm trying not to do it because I just have to see how I fail. So, it was one of my, one of my class last semester called one of five. It's a very tough class in CS department, computer science department. And I forced this, I did not do the class very well. I did not do a lot of assignments. And I forced it to the Facebook group telling everyone that I did not do the assignment. And I told the professor that I did not do it. Because, you know, I just wanted to test my own. And I wrote a story out of it. It's called Learning by Not Doing. How do you guys check it out? I think it's very valuable experience. If you have not done it in a tough time, not doing the assignment because you just don't, you just want to see how it felt. That's an important experience for us. Very tough for me. It was so, so hard. I'm somewhat of a typewriter guy. I want to do this and I kind of wouldn't be like. So, I wrote a few things from this experience. One, you create your own safety net. You know, you can fail a class but you're still fine, you can graduate. So, have that safety net, understand it. You explore the boundaries and test very wisely. You know, you experiment can fail but that experiment doesn't fail. So, test wisely. One of the biggest experience I've done in toughs I really highly recommend those who still have a few years happening. If you ever fail, your major is not for you. Take a semester if you can afford. Think about it in advance. Take a semester totally not doing anything in your major at all. And I see how you feel. I did that in my junior fall. I told myself if I'm not doing any philosophy or not doing any computer science I'm going to see if I miss either of them. If I do miss them, I mean, I care about them. But if I not, then just forget it. And I did not miss neither of them. So, you know, coming out actually was very tough. I'm not doing anything. It was very hard but I learned that. I could take it and I didn't really care and so I can continue living with a lot more more relaxation and also more sense of purpose and know about what I wanted to do which is not a computer science philosophy. So that was a helpful test. Not easy, but yeah, very important to move beyond the good student mindset to the lifelong learner mindset going beyond the great, going beyond the expectation of professor in society or whatever. I think it's really important to test that. And then we can look at my other fellow in clubs. I've also failed a lot. Here's one example. sophomore year I ran this club, a complex fellowship. I was a fellow in my freshman years and it's a group for a student interested in entrepreneurship, social impact mentorship and I was very young all the time. I took on the club. I had a team. We worked together kind of well but it was hard and you know, running a club is like, oh my gosh. Managing people is hard and this is one of my earlier experience feeling the pain of dealing with people. It's hard to get people in the same room, get to save time, get people care so hard. And so we decided to give it and some of my learning from the experience is that the more I've reflected a lot on it I think number one lesson I've learned is you have the courage to kill the baby if you have it. It's hard. Sometimes you have to do it, just do it. And then the second lesson I learned is that I am essentially someone who cares a lot about people and so it's very hard for me to work with people and they're realizing that they're not doing well and I think much about wanting to do people and focusing on the whole project and the rest of the team. And I learned that I go now from caring too much and I learned that lesson. I cannot care too much about wanting to do people sometimes to let some people go and move on. A big lesson, very important. Fail at work. This is probably one of the more epic failures. This is a letter, an email received from a boss. I bossed two summers ago in the Bay Area so as you can read it's a 2000 word email I got on Thursday 9 July 28 just two days before I came home. That was rough. The design of the workshop was incredibly weak so I got bad feedback. I cried at night, cried a bit again in the morning. It took a while to really breathe through that pain. I don't know if it might happen to you guys. I told myself it might happen to me in the future as well, happy now. Example number two, the last summer of my boss, number two. From my perspective, you have a great deal of underuse potential. We just have to continue to hold you back because the way you naturally operate makes you upward and I'm moving farther before interacting. You were not a summer intern at Comic-Tek. I would have stopped playing you after the first one or two weeks because you wasn't looking out. So she was very nice in telling me that I could have been fired. Thank you so much. I could have been fired. I usually have reasonable self-esteem and every time this kind of thing happens I just have to take a deep breath. This time I didn't cry until she talked to the other person. So I was very emotional and stable listening to this. I think I appreciated my boss. It's hard though. So a few lessons learned. Growing up because living with the consequences of my own actions, things that I did, and now this is the shit that I have to bear. And this is the real world. This is the professional world. And I've got feedback and I'm learning from it. I feel pretty confident about that now. This boss actually told me that she had a lot of respect for me as a learner. I do have a lot of procedure. So that's a bonus point. Lesson number two, cry if you have to. Learn and move on. I did cry. It's tough. Then just learn and move on. And then the last lesson I think is really important. I usually forget. I usually hear people after summer saying things about their internship. But then there's not much relevant to their school life anymore. And to me that's not the case. I love being in the summer, seeing people how they make things happen. How they run meetings, how they facilitate. I learned a lot. I brought so much of that back to where I did a senior year running club, running group, organizing, building teams. So much of that. So very valuable learning. So much that. Working together was so hard. I had to write up a kind of a menu on how to make the most of your career. And I put it online. I sent it to my bosses. I sent it to my future boss just a few days ago. So I hope to convince you that I'm kind of crazy. But it actually works. It's very scary, very vulnerable to put myself out there and tell people that this is how I look. And I'm not telling them unless you have to bend for me. Or at least know that this is how I look. We're so hard to work together. You all know that it's so hard. That people are so complex. I try my best to make myself understandable. Hopefully I convince you that being crazy could be useful and cool. You can find it online. After it goes to 1.25. So fail number three, relationship. I failed also several relationships. I can't go into too much detail, but I can stretch some of the learnings. Learning number one, this is exactly what I've said a few times to people. You have said no to my proposal, not to me as a person. I still keep that in my heart. It's true. Learning to separate the person from the action is very important skill. And being separate, I would separate ourselves with our own action too. Yeah, I emphasize number two, cry. You have to learn to move on. Useful lesson. You know, big boys do cry. Small boys also cry. And then the last lesson is, yeah, this is, I'm telling you in a very tricky way. It works and it's very important to be kind to everyone, including especially yourself. This is very hard, especially when it comes to tricky emotional stuff and life stuff. I'm being very quick with all this inside here to just give you a sample. You can always talk after if you want. And the last failure I think is really the most important failure that I keep failing all the time trying to learn from it. It's failing to keep up with my own expectation. I think we have a lot of expectations for ourselves. I do have some expectations for myself and I usually don't need them. And so how I do it then, I have two things that I keep in mind all the time. Two quotes like Peter Drucker, a personal hero of mine, very well known author. One, a person grows according to the demands he makes on himself according to what he considers as achievement and attainment. And this is relevant to what I said about playing with your own boundary a year to be able. I learn to set my own boundaries of what I cast as meaningful as achievement and success. And then I make demands. I can listen to the world at the same time being able to come up with my own definition. That was not easy. It has happened a lot in terms of how I feel about working and being like. And the second one is do not try to change yourself but work and work hard to improve the way you perform. It's very hard. I think most of us just think that we have to be well-rounded. We have to witness and fix our witness, which is true. At the same time being able to remember that we have a certain way of doing things that have become our own strength and learning to use them. Very important. So with that, I wanted to share kind of a personal thing, personal issue. Being a synaptic scholar is not just about the thing you do with the world. Also what goes on in your internal life. I would say my tough journey has been kind of overcoming and embracing and now I'm celebrating my own insecurity. We all have insecurities. I wouldn't say I'm more secure right now, I'm just saying that. I think I'm a lot more comfortable being insecure and just tell people that I'm not really good. So what happened? It came to tasks in sophomore year, freshman and sophomore year. I had that feeling about having a lot of ideas in the world and I wanted to do a lot of things in life. And this feeling that I'm not enough to the task and that was kind of a crippling sense of insecurity. It took me a long journey to move to 2015, one of the biggest transformation that I've had. This new motto, that two phrases of it. First part is I'm enough, which is not easy to remember sometimes. And that can be more, which is something that being able to uphold both phrases at the same time, it's not easy. That's 2015 for me. 2016 I'm kind of going to upward wave and so feeling that I'm enough and I will be a lot more and I wish I could be doing a lot more in 2016, reaching out to the world and more stuff, getting more and more and more and more. And 2017 I think for me is a life in my side. This needs some explanation. Because why do you think I'm too crazy? So, you know, you've seen a lot of things that happened to me, right? I'm fairly old and all that. And one thing I'm trying to think about life these days is that life is a massage. And they're different kind of massages. They are like the normal, very nice massage. But if you're good and they're like the right key, which is you felt super light, you wouldn't even feel anything. It's just like magic. And there's time massages that are breaking your bones. But they're all massages, you know, you're able to breathe through it, and you feel pretty good. So I'm using that as a motto in my life of the Shadat. I hope that it will be useful for you when you go to massage also when you need to lie. Just think of everything as a massage. It could hurt a bit and could be really nice. So that's an internal motto, internal journey. And then speaking of I will be a lot more inspiring you to be a bit crazier. This is another example of how crazy I am. I do quite a lot of personal mapping stuff. I love this and I'm sharing with you guys. I have ideas of who I am, the people I want to be, the skill I want to learn, how I'm going to improve this, how I'm going to get more practice. So I'm really crazy about all these things. And, you know, I learned because I'm just someone who enjoys it, but I also learned that most of these are just concepts that you can change over time. And life is definitely not represented through these simple maps. So I wanted to share a few of the lessons I learned that I got over the past four years in Tufts. And number one about people, learn to expect very little of people. Otherwise you get hyper-extra often. But then, you know, anyone who goes beyond that little low bar will really cherish them. And you know, I love all the people in my life, cherish the people who go beyond that low bar. We live in the better side, just have films. There's no reason to do it seriously. There's no reason to do it. I don't know, I just try my best to do that every day and be surprised. They usually go together very well. In relationships, never burn bridges. I have learned from my experience, not so much of a negative one, mostly positive one, don't burn bridges even to my bosses who have said like that kind of thing to me. I just do like say thank you not for once in a while, once I feel like kind of blown up from that. So you say thank you, never burn bridges. And share vulnerability, really, really important concept. As I was writing this slide, thinking too, who am I to say this? It's a very common mindset. Who am I to say this? Those are seemingly wise things. And then I thought, wait, who are you? Who is that voice that say that you cannot say this? And so that's the whole point. There's always that voice in our head, just being aware that there's a voice. And do it anyway. So in our relationship, our own life, nothing ever really dies very, very well but never burn bridges. I think the question I've been asking myself these days is how do I turn what people call shared and fertilize it? How do we look at something that people throw away? People of society throw away. I really want to make a difference and all that. And so this is a model that I came up with years and heard about and also reflected in my experience. Is that I came with an idea that I want to make an impact. And then some of you might be that person and you know someone who said, I want to make a difference. So you started out with an impact. One thing you make an impact. And then once you have one thing you make an impact, you have a project in mind, you have a different project, you want to do stuff. And then once you've got a project, you find the people that you want to work with and then start working on it. And then you carry out the project, you go through the experience and you experience the kind of internal transformation you do work in the world and you just realize that we are not really there to change the world. We actually be there to change, to be touched by life, to be touched by the people that we try to serve. And so that's what many of you might have had and I have myself. And I realize that after that it's actually not about changing the world, it's actually about being changed. And so what I'm realizing for my own life and what I'm doing in the future is actually after that internal transformation becoming a different person, I became a different person maybe more cat-free, more cheerful, wanting to do stuff but not really caring too much about the results. And by becoming a more cheerful guy which is that internal sense of joy, I got to meet more people who are all kind of people with all sort of cool stuff and they're all like great folks and I was meeting these people you get a lot of thoughts and ideas and with all these thoughts and ideas and you can actually start doing a lot of cool stuff with people who are better places not even without trying. And this is actually what I wanted to share with the synaptic group because I think we are actually on this side hopefully we are on this side all kind of different kind of people couples and all people all that. And that's the whole point of cultivating a sense of community so that we can have this part and that part instead of starting from there alone now which is really sad. So that's a message for the synaptic group and this is the last note which is a big note I found and the most important question that I've been asking myself since maybe a few years ago that explained the internal transformation I had. This question by Einstein is the universe a friendly place? It's a question that we all have to ask ourselves at the end of the day. It's a question that helped guide me through every action that I take in life. And with that I just wanted to offer the last thing is that if you've ever been to a phase of your life where you don't see the point of living and you wonder what the hell you're doing in this world, this life and you feel wandering, you feel purposeless which I'm sure would happen or already is happening to many of you come talk to me. I've kind of been through some cycles of it so I have some experience of how to deal with that phase of not having a purpose and I can share a testimony from a friend actually a friend just sent me an email yesterday I have been thinking a lot about what living a meaningful life actually means and of course it doesn't mean feeling a great sense of purpose at every moment a lot of it is just trying to in between learning to love, to swear as you said on the other day I told a friend I told him that so it's not like changing the words actually living day by day so please see me up if you ever want to chat about it and yeah, last last slide about my questions Synaptica has been my favorite family where I am I'm allowed to ask people questions and I love to ask people this question but more probably not today but keep that in mind some of the questions they found really beautiful why isn't it most beautiful and what is the way you want to ensure you're living and that is the final quote the point is to leave everything leave the question now perhaps then something in the future you will gradually be significant in your way to the answer it's a beautiful light by real color a German poet that I really love and has been my help a lot when I go to the face of not really knowing what I'm doing just keep having the question with that, thank you so much so that was a very tricky act to follow so you were a little difficult for me but just to preface this I approached the presentation as a way to kind of tell you a couple of things that I've been doing and also just to show you my journey through TAPS what it's meant to be and how this community has fit into all of it so I'll start off with my title finding my epicenter of eclectic movements and as you know me you know I love literation which is why that is there so just to start off I came to TAPS so excited I left high school just so ready to get my head in the game and just kind of soak up all of these different clubs and classes I hadn't felt really challenged in my old school I loved it, loved my community but coming to TAPS and just seeing all of these ideas there were after all of these activities it was just a lot and so for me the first year was just a blur of just non-stop meeting people going to events I probably went to 30 GINs and it was also a frustrating journey because as much as I kept trying to lose out I was really difficult for me to figure out where I fit in within it was my grand purpose was my thing and that was a question that I had been struggling a lot through high school what did I want to do not just what did I want to major but what did I want to get out of these four years and so I did not have that question here which is why kind of I ended up in this group because I realized that I wasn't deeply wrong and that was a question that a lot of people were having so in an academic sense what have I come up with in these four years I didn't do pieces but I've just written a lot of papers and through each paper I've learned a lot I've taken classes from religion to sociology, actually my advisor's sociology even though I'm an international major in history and so I actually put them on the folder of the ones I was most proud of or the ones that were more polished not just like I've come to like 30 or 40 and I would still be the final spirit so more come but I think that this just represents the kind of variety of things that I've been tackling everything from learning about the history of America's relationship the United States' relationship with Iran to writing up paper recently about French poetry and I think that really for me has been what my liberal arts education has been it's just fusing these different interests and really having the opportunity to take these courses and meet my professors when I walk around campus and the professor says, hi! I still am so excited I'm like, hi professor I'm great to see you it's just a feeling of creating those personal relationships not just with the students but with the people who are up there teaching you because they don't have so much knowledge to teach but they they've really been a support system and I think the biggest example of this was actually my history advisor I had always thought about being a history major I'd always been taking history classes and been an international relations program but I was like, I don't know if I'll be able to actually put it together and then I went to talk to her my junior spring she was actually one of my history and her junior teacher for African history was a really long time I don't know if I remember it but she was like, oh do you want me to be your advisor I think you can do it I didn't even ask her and she just already said that to me and it was just kind of giving me that helping hand that really made me take that step and that same advisor this all semester was definitely tough semester academically on the subject of words, words, words I never had a writer fall so that extended through the semester what all you're doing is writing is a kind of a big struggle especially because for me writing is a really huge part of my identity and it's just it's a really frustrating thing to feel like you can't do something that you theoretically think that you love to do and so I was strong for that but she really gave me the best and so you can do it if you have to take care of yourself if you can't read anything you can be okay and just permission to take a break I think that's been kind of the theme for me this year just permission to say no permission to say yes permission to say no I'm just not up to it today and that's okay so different activities TEDxTAPS has been incredibly important to me both because of the social community that it's created but also because of the role that it allowed me to take on I got to be a speaker culture which was so cool because it basically meant I got to talk to people which is what I like to do and I realized that talking to people actually can be you know and helping them look for their ideas and you know the satisfaction of seeing my speakers present and like crafting these all cool conversations talking seeing him do it on stage and meeting his parents you did it and you know I'll get to this later but I think that was kind of the first realization of I really like this thing called education I really like this thing about being able to be a lending hand to someone being able to help them work throughout through their ideas because through talking to people you also learn about yourself and about about how you can help others through just being a bouncing board in this role I was a bouncing board but I had a lot of it epic for you to know I'm an institute of global leadership I'm one of their flagship programs it's epic so this year the topic that I took on last year was the future of Europe I haven't talked to you guys about it for an hour but it was really for me like an academic marathon and it was really I think what I needed junior year I can go abroad so it was kind of like my own abroad experience and I just doubted into just pages and pages of readings we have four hour exams we have to like learn what's happening in Europe the broad sense of the world what was extremely satisfying I'm not sure what we're doing right now was that we had different lecturers every week and just getting to hear the perspective of all these academics and professionals who are not only studying there was a lot of professors but also doing things in the world and who have taken this information and actually applied it it was really inspiring and just an incredible exposure to what you can do after tasks and how to use your knowledge and just really I mean it was a test to my patience you know being able to sit in a classroom for two and a half hours it was a really restless person so that was also a learning experience but the community of people I met and I think this is the same for SNAP because again it's just people who wanted to push themselves a little bit farther people who wanted to make something a more other tough career and being surrounded by that energy was incredibly inspiring and just made a whole journey worth living so what did I make I was coming to SNAP and I was like I didn't really make presentations or really do thesis but in the sense of what have we produced in every class I've had different products for Epic one of the things I wanted to do was research everyone does this thing called research I want to go out and do research so with two other friends and we decided to we wanted to do an examination of comparative analysis of migration in Europe this was one of the the refugee crisis is still happening but it was one that really was escalating and so we thought that it was interesting because we were all from very different places in Europe from Macedonia, Spain and Kingdom had a very different relationship with how the refugee crisis was manifesting itself so we each did our own literature review of the policies that each country had that was my final project for my first semester at Epic and then theoretically our idea was we were going to go into the world and we were going to interview people and gather this information I got through two or three interviews with some academics in Spain we came back and then life down the way and speaking of failure the research project kind of fell through but some huge takeaways were the process of applying to do research which was a whole IRB thing which I didn't know about working with others giving an idea and then even if it doesn't work what we get at it so even though we didn't do the research we did learn a lot about the issue and we did present it in the Epic conference and that was really rewarding and at the end of my second semester of Epic I had a whole project so even though I work talking about the issues there's a whole reflection piece of why I did but that was my final project so after Epic last summer I did my first kind of real internship that related to my interest or to what I thought was going to be my next step I worked at the council on relations which is a think tank in Washington DC I was under the independent task force which is a department that puts out kind of like discourse actually a report every couple of semesters out there once or twice a year on an issue that is prevalent in the world so the last one they came out with was the Arctic and it relates to foreign the United States foreign relations interests so it was Arctic and they were also doing so I did a lot of busy work but it was really awesome the second week I was there with Paul Ryan who was like DC is normal everyone in DC is a celebrity is a politician or something first time in the capital it was the first time I was alone living alone making a city my own doing an internship that I had gone to myself I had a five to ten of things except by a son I had to buy a lot or just get a fly from a plot that's a common experience and so just the feeling of having this tangible task that I could accomplish in the summer was incredibly important and the people that I met both from top surprise had an incredible community in DC but also my bosses were saying don't work bridges I still can't touch with my supervisor and just I'm so fancy and all these jobs and so formal but then when you get there people can't even work out there written or visual because it takes a lot of courage if you write something original and I haven't written any of these pieces this is just embarrassing I did freshman year I was in part campus I went through my friends there but the reason that what I got from that experience I've never written a block in my life but the fact that I got to be published as a freshman was incredibly empowering even if it was writing about winter skincare routines it was a very simple material but it was on the web and people were reading it and people were reading my work and now I'm going to realize that I have this internal struggle writing that might not be a good thing but the satisfaction of sharing your work is really important because at the end of the day you're producing for yourself but also to transmit it to other people and to share it personally I love talking to people it's kind of my medium of expression but writing in arts are close seconds so how does this all sound so synaptic which is why we're here today I interviewed I still remember my interview with Sam Berry I don't know if you guys know him and I was so excited I was like yeah this is going to be such a fulfilling group and it really has been it hasn't been in the formal sense of you know I've created a product, I went to Kennedy and I did research but it hasn't been in the sense that it's been a form of mentorship between my academic and personal career at TAFs because I'm concerned about people who are engaged and who check in with me both at personal level and they just they see things in a very similar way and just to have that space because I know there's a lot of people at TAFs who have that capacity of introspection but TAF is space that really permits you to have those kind of conversations is really special so these are a couple of our group we're not quantifying group photos we're really out of time but I wanted to point this out because I think that for SNAPDICS there's been frustrations because I think that it's been difficult to be a group that's so individual but then worthless and collective and to have this sort of sense of wanting to do something without a clear idea of what we want to do at a level and at a group level super true I'm so sorry so one of my memories from this group is sophomore sophomore year was the snow or we'll get it that's the reason it's stuck in my mind and we were kind of having a crisis but where is this group going some of the juniors have left and one of our main projects was like we really want to get fireside chats going which is like round table conversation and it gave me such an insight about group collaboration and leadership of how to allocate responsibilities how to see who can step up when you step up, when your role is to just listen your role is to contribute so what it means to SNAPDICS is one of the main things I've gone from it is this lesson of leadership you know of what is leadership what is group activity what is teamwork because we're all a team and we all have common goal which is to to do things and to be great to be the best we can so that to me a bit of a broad scale I got a lot from having the opportunity to be able to step up SNAPDICS and then final slide is what has the college been and what has been a fun ride I have I think everyone has a different experience with this space in this community but I can just say that I feel just incredibly privileged to have been able to be here for years because the kind of people you meet at the end of the day it's all about the people but you take a step out of this campus and it's really hard to have conversations that you're having with everyone around you it's just a level of creativity of passion of perseverance and determinants and just fun I think I would go to other campus and they might be really interesting, they might be really intellectual but this balance of being able to I'm going to work in a library until 12 am but then I'm going to go out and have fun and dance and just have my own life and have that balance to me that's incredibly important and I think that it's really seen on this campus so I'm very thankful and what is my next step so I'm not probably going to talk but basically I realized this year that I wanted to do something I didn't want to go to a 95 job where I could at least see the purpose of what I was doing I really feel like one of the things that has been knocking in my life has been this contact this on the ground work with people and so I realized through some volunteer work I've been doing that with little kids and I always knew that but thinking of what my thing is I really care about education because I've had privilege of having a great education and it's been so powerful and impacting my life so I kind of had no idea I kind of fell into this but I would be doing Teach for America for anyone who doesn't know it's this two year program and you go into low and good communities and teach anything from elementary to high school so I will be in Miami next year and if anyone is visiting or wants to visit please let me know because I would love to see some family visits but yeah just to wrap it up I just wanted to say that SNAPX has been an incredibly important part of my Tufts career and I really appreciate all of the any moment that I have with you guys individually or collectively because it's definitely just smart so thank you and I hope to see you this next week Sean Sean Chapman is seeing me this year can't wait to leave but that being said I mean obviously Tufts is a great place what I wanted to say today was just essentially like when I came to the school I wouldn't say I was the most sitting person in the world but I was definitely up there like I came from a low income family low socioeconomic class came from a pretty racist part of Florida that it essentially affected the Hispanic side of my identity I had close family members passed away a bunch of stuff and I came here and I felt like it was going to change the case in terms of obviously this place is like the paragon of social justice just at the forefront of so many different good things that people are trying to do in the world and in my mind at first nothing really changed and it took me a while to realize this especially through synaptics and specifically talking with Kuyan because he's like the optimist and it literally comes to the point where it's just like your viewpoint I mean you can basically be in an environment you want to be in and you're going to see whatever you want to see and if you just have a very negative viewpoint you're going to pick those aspects of life and vice versa and by extension I mean it's just like generally applicable to all life I mean I think a lot of people if they don't sell their environment short they sell themselves short and another kind of just point I wanted to make was that there's no such thing as talent there's only self-efficacy it's only how well you think that you can do something and like Kuyan was saying you just got to go out and do it sometimes I mean it's hard to do nowadays I've been out as many degrees but yeah I mean that's kind of all I wanted to say I mean synaptics like for me that was that was the biggest takeaway for me like just seeing so many people that had these amazing passions and just like goals for their life that they wanted to do that I originally thought just might have been like silly and just like not realistic and I realized that as soon as you close that door then it's going to stay closed and there's no opportunity whatsoever so yeah in my old age what synaptics and I think when I think back to my favorite moments it's hearing very about different people's life in this organization and how you just like you know it's a microcosm of toughs that you just don't really know the talent you're surrounded by and the beautiful lines until you do and that's been like the greatest joy for me here the mentorship, the friendship that people who really keep crazy ideas and pointed me down to the past that I would never take so on that I'm actually going to tell a story that has less to do with synaptics and more just to do with my life and where my head has been for the past year and a half and the title is the ultimate title for 10X Tops actually we, this is something we we've had X Tops which I've been involved in organizing most of my time here we were doing some idea generation and I just heard this 99% of this little podcast about the anthro sphere which is apparently the layer of material under human civilization that is sort of the newest the newest geologic layer and will be something that will be permanently added to the surface in a way that is productive because they're sort of theorizing that this will be something that will always be underneath us that it will be able to provide us resources to you can mine it for copper and metal you could process it for different things and so I was like guys, what if we explore this like what is what more is there to explore like underneath our feet I'm not a geologist but I guess this really starts at the river this is a picture of the Green River in Utah and it's a river that I grew up going to pretty much every year with my dad who's a fly fisherman we've been here for 6 hours and there's so much to be growing up in Colorado there's a lot of like facts and mythology and stuff that I happen to know and it's a lot of water going to the Pacific it's going to the Atlantic where the tributaries go, all this sort of stuff that was just so important to the people that I grew up around and I'm using this river started behind a dam also part of the interstate our way of storing water and ended at the Colorado River Delta which looks like this it does not reach the salt and sea the sea quartets anymore I've never been here, I don't think many people have but you could say that that entire watershed is being perfectly efficiently allocated to human use because it does not reach anymore but there's so many pros and cons to that and so many pros and cons that from an environmental standpoint you can see like dams are bad draining the whole watershed and all this is really bad but also when you grow up in the American West like I was very much, I understood that we wouldn't civilization would exist out there without dams or any of these major human systems in a different place so I was thinking about this and I also started taking GIS for the very first time and GIS was really cool if you don't know what it is it's basically like analysis through chronography and these were like first maps I made of the city of Denver and I was like wow, I can see I just see so many things about this one place just by sort of parsing out what is important and what I don't know so through there I started I was really at that point doing a lot of urban studies or the planning work I I've gone through four majors in my time at Tufts so I was pretty pretty meandering and that was this was something that really was like yes, this is really cool to be able to take take all of these things about landscape and bring it to something that will tell you about where to go in the future and what the framing of the current condition so from there I found myself last summer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in their landscape architecture program I like made a major decision when I was applying to summer programs and applied to this architecture instead of planning so I was doing a lot of stuff like this you know, like making making models, making contour lines a lot of like landscapey stuff making plans and it was getting sort of I was getting a lot of what I needed there I think to throughout my sophomore year at Tufts I become really stuck in really needing to push myself to do everything and to be good at everything and not ever feel like I was happy which it sort of sounds like most people who go through college feel at some point and I just like even with all that work that I was doing it was like where am I going why is any of this useful but my advisor who was like really a near and near person by her she actually did she did her landscape thesis on Grand Junction Colorado and I was just like I was so obsessed with her it was towards the it was towards the final project and I was sort of toying with this idea of like like viewing the editing of land and of the environment is inherently harmful it's a scar on the earth and she was like okay that's a way to frame it but it's also not there's so much sort of layering and human growth and things that we need to survive so towards the end wait I want to do this one first so this is like I was like great story for my Colorado project our goal was to work in this area of south Boston near like sort of near Dorchester it's by the old Harbor of Chesterville Beach and just like do something like make an intervention in some way and so I was like I was like okay like highway burns and linear stuff and like I don't even know and some other people were working on Seelorite State which I thought was a really interesting way to start to see geography because what it does it sort of takes it's like someone has put a watercolor onto onto an urban area and been like all this this is not going to be here in a period of time that is is rational to us and that is that really you know we need to care about doing this work and at the same time reading this book and the beginning of this book is this section is this piece called Achafalaya on the Mississippi River and how upstream of the Mississippi near Baton Rouge there is a place where the river is damped so that it stays flowing out the current delta through the islands and if it wasn't damped it would have switched it would have about 50 years ago it would have totally switched water sheds into the watershed next to it so it's an alluvial delta and it's just a second to move so rapidly and so without without the human intervention New Orleans wouldn't exist New Orleans still shouldn't exist and what happens to New Orleans is is sort of the a feature of of this like of this really like you know our need to preserve heritage and our need to preserve place at the cost of many in that place but also that need coming in this very what I see is like they're a mechanical very surgical like concrete walls all over in levees so read that read that and I was like oh my god like what if I want a sea wall what if we start thinking about sea walls and this is something that I don't think anyone wants to think about across the beaches in their city that you need to build a sea wall to prevent the entire climate change from your city but in Boston because of how the geography is laid out and because of the geology sea walls are a very good solution to prevent the sort of flooding related to sea level rise so I was like alright I want to build a sea wall my advisor was like you can't build a wall like don't build a wall that would be your project so I was like ok I'm having to build a wall other people should learn from that too and so I was like ok what if we think about where the wall would be should it need to be built in somewhere in the future and build a park around that as a way to engage with climate futures so this is my project starting to think about like how can we think about about like futures of the Anthropocene and the Anthropocene climate change in space in a way that's didactic and oh this is the site and then out the blue is what would flood the six feet of climate change which we're going to see around like a hundred and twenty hundred fifty years from now so this is my design and the entire thing is supposed to be you know how does this land change over time how do you know you have this current state and then as water rises things deteriorate things die but the community is right there living with that destruction which is something that became really really juicy to me and I'm interested in in the practice of memory preserving the building and landscaping so I did that really really got a lot out of that wanted to continue with it for my capstone and I sort of had this opportunity where I was like okay I could continue to see what water rises in Boston because it's here or I could really challenge myself and choose a different location just because the conditions for where you see what water rises are so different depending on where you are but I was like okay, Florida and Florida is really unique in that based upon the geology it's not going to be like a spilling over the spilling over the walls kind of thing it's going to be bubbling and it already does bubble up through people's lawns because it's completely porous so there's no building seawalls to save your lands which are just a surreal place that are going to be gone it should the climate future be true because even though seawalls will rise there's their legal protecting the ecological things going on there but more maps because that's sort of it just became a way of thinking for me and that's our design same sort of culture like people will live with this what was really important to me was to bring it to a privileged space in Miami not to actually not be designing in a place with a higher percentage of low income people with a higher percentage of people's color because it is people from privileged backgrounds who are who are contributing the most to these factors of climate change so if they've got the money to do a waterfront renovation let's do this right here and let's share them over time I did that poor stuff and throughout all of this I really like I think what started happened as I started to break away I first come to University you write a lot of papers or you do a lot of problem sets depending on which side of the stem you may be saying it's like paper's problem sets there are many different ways to do it and this community opened that up for me a huge way where I saw people like Tim McDonald one of the biggest mentors and friends to be a biologist but also be wanting to do by the design of the biology and to start to think could we add more the presentation even was so graphic and so illustrative of like of like different ways of thinking that everything that was happening here was like okay I can start to play playing with materials that I never could and that's also continued into other sort of work that I'm doing still work that really has to do with with Karma Change and with Landscape and to me is just ways of like representing my identity in the West like what does the digital modeling of the community look like compared to how it's experienced can we think of different ways to do topography that are not just building models on top can we sort of start to use ingredients of reality of real data to build fictions that are equally dynamic this one was sort of my my final piece for the semester that I titled Reformation Suspension and after the Bureau of Reformation with which took which basically like like the American West would not be what it is today about Bureau of Reformation in good and bad ways because Bureau of Reformation built every single dam hundreds and out like pretty much a thousand dams in the American West so I don't want to think about that and sort of a larger after this year and a half long journey that like I like totally when I was being in my junior year, I'm being a software freshman year, I've never been doing any of this work which I guess sort of speaks to the fact that that like you can't like you can plan your life and you should plan your life is not going to go as you think it is and even now I'm starting to question like do I want to do landscape architecture in the future, would I rather be working with climate science or working on the ground in communities and unfortunately I'm actually going to have the ability to do that here back in Colorado with the with the continental vitriol coalition I'm going to be doing cartography, mapping conservation work and trail design for them and this is trail that goes it's one of the big three it's this one the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail that are the big three continental trails and this one is the longest the hardest because all of it is about 5,000 foot elevation and the least height and to me this this like area here like the more that I think about like I think about land and I think about just the layering of stuff that we do it the more that I like want to be working in a place that that I like like I not only grew up in but I really within my own sort of whatever you have cultural conscience I recognize that that like the impact of western settlement here and the impact of the erasure of indigenous history but also the impact of you know what what the system like this can actually mean for natural preservation even though it's just a trail it can mean an entire natural core that is going to be protected um owing so much to humans and animals and to the preservation of so many of these watersheds once I go to the Atlantic once I go to the Pacific so yeah that's that's one project I did a lot at us too also this is I think close to that trail I'm actually not sure I'd possibly never write that trail but I will yeah um yeah is there any questions or thoughts yeah I was just amazed by how people could do so many different things it's so amazing man in my world people are like not like going out of nature so it's so refreshing just here hey this is your world which is full of nature and making map and I'm thinking of that whenever I thought of map I always think about the map of human development and for you it's a very different kind of map but the concept is similar right attaching certain concept to some part of reality yeah I'm in about framing the world in a way that will help it and also like I don't really even hide that much myself I just like it's my least favorite about things to do but I just like I really love this place but also like it is funny because this is one very specific story I think all of us have different things to be going to talk about as like projects so this is mine I really think it would be quite a one of the familiar faces of you, I'm Cynthia I was abroad all the last year and then this year I've been buried and I'm going to present to you guys soon which was my thesis called every walk of the actress who died in 1000 deaths I'm not sure if anyone, I don't have some people with your thoughts so I hope this is not too repetitive but I think it was a kind of, I don't know what else to present to you I think one thing was not to step on such a good storyteller so one of these things or just you know us telling stories making narratives of our college careers making narratives of our lives and all of this is storytelling and I keep today kind of quite unprepared in the sense of I'm still kind of reeling from this experience that was less than a week ago and I'm kind of in a mystical state of mind right now kind of trying to keep the po-show blues away so let's talk about, it's kind of storytelling so this one project was a live cinema theater piece which about the life and works of Anna Maywong who was the first Asian-American actress to make it and hauled you over the 19 months and so kind of what drew me to your story kind of what Nathaniel touched upon a lot of it is kind of from my own family experience, like what does that ask for what does it mean to be you know have two feet, like to have feet in two worlds, but also feel like a landmine and so Anna Maywong she was an Asian-American actress so she's a third generation Asian-American who grew up in Los Angeles but no matter what she did she was also regarded as a Chinese actress in America so she was infamous for playing roles like the Dragon Lady China Doll so basically you know the evil Chinese woman kills everybody or the China Doll was like submissive and falls in love with a white man and then commits suicide so for the longest time the POC community didn't really want to acknowledge which is kind of a taboo because she represented these really painful images they had it was until her centennial about 20 years ago people were like okay let's reevaluate her legacy because people were like oh it's not as simple as she took these stereotypical roles and she was complicit in a racism it wasn't so simple it was all the racism that she faced and then a long time in her life she was like I wonder if I go to China like maybe I am a Chinese actress and so she ends up going to China and then she's hated by everyone in China as well not everyone but a big portion of people because she's kind of torn the two national agendas in the West she was torn by Orientalism you know people wanted had these images of the East and to help them both promote or justify what they were doing in the East but when she went to China she was used as a national propaganda because China was trying to modernize in a very Western sense and he saw her as being a bad name giving a bad name for the Chinese people and also saw her as a representation of the old China the exonified China which they didn't want to be they wanted to be industrial and modern and so she's kind of torn between these really big political and systematic kind of pressures but also having a very personal connection to it having two personal lives for identity and so I wanted to explore this through art because that's kind of the primary way I found that I expressed myself and expressed ideas that I allowed in yeah so one thing that really interested me was not just her story her representation and misrepresentation but also how this was started and told already and so from basically from when there's a revival of anime while it works and at first it was very much like at first she was like a sinner and then obviously she was the same and people were like oh she's amazing she gave so much dignity to her roles everyone just raised this and I think there's somewhere very caught in between she was a very calculating woman she knew when to do what but she also she was not just the victim more of the villain of her story and it's interesting to see how people crafted that she was American and that she wasn't American and then she became Asian-American but that journey really wasn't so simple because Asian-American didn't exist as a term until the 60s and she existed in the 20s so what was her life for her to pave her own path something that was really hybrid and she existed in this weird zone where there wasn't a language to talk about it but since some ways she embodied it so much in her work already so yeah this got me thinking how do I want to tell her story there's this play already written about her that I really didn't like because I felt like it victimized her didn't give her any agency the last line of the play was basically you can play any role being bought when you're dead and so I was like I was really happy with that but she kinda joked she's a crazy human she used to joke to people like oh my tombstone is your right actress who died a thousand deaths because she'd always have a dire movie either by being killed or committing suicide because she would never have that happy ending as what she would orient a woman at the time so I was like okay so how do we tell her story and I realized I didn't want to use kind of conventional means of storytelling because I felt like it didn't fit her she was actress who did theater work who did radio shows, who did film it's like how do you encompass a life that was so rich and so I started looking beyond this might mean sort of art especially this film so I was like okay, obviously I feel like let's make a short film of a victory about her that has also been done and I'm like that I feel it's enough to encompass this kind of complex issue so I started looking into other ways of storytelling once an artist and a hero's journey very classic western Hollywood cinema and so that's how I came upon this idea of live cinema and theater so what is live cinema and theater a film set I'm not the first person to do it but there's, you know, everyone so far people have done it so what it is is having live cameras live on stage filming what is being acted on stage they're projecting it live on screen it's a very loose term, it's not an official theater term or film term yet but there's two prominent actors artists who have done it one is Katie Mitchell who used it she liked the close up of the theater she's everyone so far away like how do you bring an audience more intimate into a theater while still being able to see the whole structure so that's why Katie Mitchell did it Wong Chung did it because he felt that you can see how you craft an image on stage and so what I used it was kind of a combination of both so I used it not only to recreate some of her movies so we recreated some film scenes of hers on stage but also because the way that I kind of approach her life was through her memories this is kind of a, this is not a linear story it takes place after she gets really drunk on it because I know it was an alcoholic proposal of her life, she gets drunk on it and then she starts hallucinating about her memories filming this movie Daughter of the Dragon and through filming these movies she starts recalling the different people of her life that are coming in and out and she kind of questions whether or not her life is going to end up like her movies you know there's a lot of parallels that you can draw between her life and her movies but also exploring how they diverge and so I can show you a few clips of and they they hear the lights another unique thing about life's in the theater you find is that you can show the audience something that they can't really see on stage just by positioning the camera differently and here you can't see the front front face but with the camera the audience can simultaneously experience this part of the stage while also seeing the face of the older anime mom oh sorry I should have promised so also kind of the structure of it was having an older anime mom view her past life like so the existence of both the older anime mom and younger anime mom we kind of see the story from the older anime mom so this is the older anime mom over here oh where's the audience the audience is sitting here so it's like a senior theater to go half circle soon we go into this recreation it's been a long time so kind of how this project started interestingly I think one thing that I learned was synaptics and so many of these things it's like letting ideas in there's this book written by Rebecca Solnit called the field guide to getting lost and there's a quote in there that I love it says leave the door open for the unknown the door to the dark that's where the most important things come from where you yourself came from where you will go and so bizarrely the idea for this project came in a dream I was first learning about anime wall in my school and one night I just was dreaming and I just saw there's a witch spoiler there's a final scene in this play where after the older anime mom has died in this movie we've recorded the death scene where she dies and her agent lover kind of are laying on the ground and the entire cast and crew who are mostly white leaves the stage and in all her movies ends up together and she gives a three year old rights to the dead younger anime wall so that's what came to me in my dream and it sounds so bizarre but it's the idea of leaving the door open I don't know who was speaking to me maybe anime wall I don't know I think leaving allowing yourself to someone's founder and having these stories come to you when you hear it you know responding to it and so that's where this project came from and from there I built the story around that one scene where anime wall gives her self kind of a funeral funeral rights so I'll try to run up here let's see and so kind of like this I mean on the wall has been walking me since high school and so it's coming throughout college you know from my studies of like anti-colonial I did a lot I did a lot of American studies ultimately ended up doing film do you guys all know what I'll be this is international literary and visual studies so I remember just simply when I talked to the head of the department I wanted to prove for you to do this major this major basically doing cross-cultural comparisons between different cultural areas and there are some of your shares in the film and I just remember like the department my head was like why do you want to do this babble on for three minutes so when I came back to myself I'm like I'm sorry I'm really confused the director just looked at me and he was like confused that's great that's exactly what I'll be as majors are confused so I feel like I've just been confused this entire time of college but I think that's what the best exploration comes from you're just grasping for things being voracious ingredients learning everything you can so this came in the end this production was actually a production between I've collaborated before on the scale of the film department the theater department and the international literary visual studies department and John and I have tried to work together on smaller things but never has it been so integrated so they're really supportive of this project and I think this project to me kind of really was the one of the things that I loved about synaptics which was this interdisciplinary aspect where like all of us came from come from different backgrounds and we talk about it and we create things and there's some sort of synergy that just happens and I feel like this moment like this project I mean they weren't that different as I would say most of us are I feel like why haven't they actually collaborated earlier on because they're all in the hearts but you know I think it created this interdisciplinary thing that wasn't really here at that point and it was only possible because of all these amazing like 30 something people worked on this project to make it happen we had people from Boston actors from Boston people locally not just the tough community which is beautiful yeah I just I guess I kind of because I kind of want to wrap this up just the same thing about you know like I think what everyone said before you know being bold and being willing to think out of the box and connecting dots that might not seem as obvious and I think this kind of project really will be able to realize that and also just like the people that you meet here so unfortunately support you through so much like I had so much anxiety going to this result out I started taking Lorazepan for those who don't know like anxiety meds I called her Laura and I'm like oh my goodness, Laura keeps me calm and so you know I mean whether it's like things that you just there's so much support and love here and people are really interested in you and old ideas and you know don't burn the bridges like here in the city you know keep those people close and they are the ones who like give life to these things I mean the show stories and the know stories like I think sometimes you need to tell stories for yourself and everything but at the same time the story wouldn't be much without the audience and so so much of the show is also made because people wanted to hear these stories I don't know where I'm going with this but I guess yeah I think one thing I just learned is you know the note of connecting dots and everything I think that process is a very kind of a feel very lonely and it's a very confusing one I think the best way to deal with it is to be okay with being lost because I don't think you'll ever not be lost I think that's something that you know it's hard to achieve and I think a few people really achieve that and so it's not about mister having to find something but just being okay with being lost and again Rebecca Solnit has beautiful line it's to be lost is to be fully present and to be fully present is to be capable of being an uncertainty of mystery and one does not get lost but loses oneself there's an implication that it is a conscious choice a choice and surrender and so I just want to thank people here in Sonata for just like making me feel like it's okay to be lost and also all of us being rambled and being lost together and so yeah as I guess everyone talked about future and so my future is very unclear right now I'm going to be on film shoot for the rest of June and the productions I need to be lost and then I'm moving to New York with no job and so I'm going to be in New York and I'm going to do the stereotypical starving artist and see if I can make it it's more of a statement I have to see this be performed live seeing how experimental it was and I didn't know how much of it was thought how much thought had gone into that process and to have to do you talk about this and to hear how this project is approachable is actually a miracle the fact that she like I do think that Mewang was in your dreams and he like spoke to you I am that spiritual mom I'm like yeah we'll constantly bested to have to tell the story but also I think that you're reading your author's note also about how you come to tell the stories also powerful so the quote by old Davis Harrow she was about choosing to zoom rather than having to create new stories tell stories of the people who never got to live their dreams and I think you've done an incredible job I think that it's an incredible position yeah actually just to give Violet Davis credit like this if you guys didn't watch the Oscars you should go and just watch Violet Davis except for the speech she got an Oscar for that speech in itself it's this you know there's one place that all the people the greatest potential are together and that's the graveyard people ask me all the time what kind of stories do you want to tell Violet assume those bodies, assume those stories the stories of people who dream big and never sell those dreams to fruition people who fell in love and lost this also I'll be editing this and the recording will come out in a month or so people want to see it but yeah so hi everyone my name is Jeanette and I was I'm very excited I guess I'm here to just be grateful for what synoptics has done for me and the people that I have met and the dream that kind of has taken me through through synoptics or through my life in touch and the main reason why I wanted to share this is because as much as I haven't been at synoptics for every single thing it made me write down my application to synoptics made me write down what I wanted to do in life what I wanted to what I envisioned, what I involved and through that space I was able to like explore and like think exchange ideas with people and I remember my application was about women empowerment and especially in developing countries or places where they are very disadvantaged and all through my life in touch I have been able to like create that and like actually visualize it using all of my studies for instance I'm a computer science major and a police side minor and those two always have always done at least something to do with women and like how can I bring this change and I feel like it's from synoptics that I was able to develop that in that idea and that's what I just wanted to say like I'm very grateful for this program and also just the intellectual conversations that we had with everyone throughout that time and to me it was really great to just meet a group of people that I guess sometimes it's so hard to just go out there and find just people talking about all different things random topics, their interests and everything but like synoptics really gave me that space to like think outside the box as well from whatever, what city was staying and just meeting all of you lovely people and for me today I think reflecting back that has been a journey and I'm really grateful to have been a part of synoptics and for that part I'm really, really, really in thought this is a synoptic scholar and yeah I just wanted to say to the seniors that are going and everyone else keep dreaming and keep doing what we love to do I mean that's what we're taking father and father and at the same time never lose who you are I guess that's where I have learned over the time and just believe in yourself believe in your dreams and with that you're going to go further and further and I want to applaud everyone for doing all the great things that you've done from TEDx to Q&A doing all of those Q&A I don't know, everything I'm sure to project the cycle that they're going to talk about I'm sure it was fun I can't remember what I'm doing to Zobia all the great work that you're doing COMSI and everything those are just for my class the people that I remember and you've really all been very inspirational to me and this group has been great and even in my absence I always feel bad for the meetings but due to I guess we all understand the work that you have and with that people were sharing my future plans so as part of what also I guess synaptics kind of put in me synaptics also helped me provide funding for me during one of my summers where I was able to do an internship back in Canada that really helped me build my technical skills and my technical career which I'm very grateful for and for my future I will be working for Deutsche Bank which is doing COMSI stuff technology and at the same time I have a project I also got a grant that I will be working on I will be doing a women empowerment project so it's a combination of technology education, women empowerment and also bringing together the aspect of Islam and peace into the project and so I will be going to Niger for one month in June to work on the project and what I will be doing is designing and actually looking into ways in which technology can be used to improve the curriculum for our rural school it's an elementary and secondary school in Niger and also there's women who are involved in the school and they always come there to study and learn about their rights because there's this woman who's doing a lot of work with that and I will be working with her on that project and so bringing this my technical aspect, my women empowerment project I was really happy and I was sharing it with Kay and I was like, yeah I'm really happy this is what I wrote in synaptics my synaptic application and right now somehow it's now like actually coming to life and I'm very excited for that opportunity so yeah, that's what I will be doing so working on designing and creating a technology computer, a computer center, so designing a computer center for this women's elementary school and secondary school and seeing what you need to integrate with the curriculum and doing other things I will also be working with my startup so this is part time but yeah, it's been great and congratulations to everyone I'm really proud of you all of you guys I hope to see you sometime for sure and on Facebook that's keeping in touch you're all going to go places that's my great regards to the founder of my jail Shaman Shaman, yeah and everyone else that is in there