Additional Experience
On campus, we are involved in a myriad of communities and activities, and this puts us at a unique advantage when it comes to the number of voices we have already been engaging in our time here, as well as a reflection of our drive since the very beginning to get to know the range of communities across campus.
In these 1.75 years we’ve been at the Institute, we have enacted countless projects and initiatives guided by our values in pursuit of a variety of goals. From taking the initiative to engage MIT Chinese Students Club with the national organization APIAVote in order to engage the Asian American vote and civic engagement to starting passion projects such as the Talented Ten or Reclaimed with Dolapo Adedokun ‘22 just three months into Yu Jing's freshmen year, we are not shy to forging space where there was no space to discuss these things. From the Stanford First Generation and/or Low Income Conference (FLICon), to the East Coast Asian American Students Union Conference (ECAASU), to Harvard’s Let’s Talk! Conference for Asian American student mental and emotional wellbeing, to 1vyG, to Leadershape, to the MIT Multicultural Conference, we have seized every opportunity to learn beyond the MIT bubble (getting MIT to pay every cent) and went even further, empowering others with us, bringing more MIT representation to many of these conferences with us the following year.
Between the both of us, we have spanned varsity sports, club sports, the UA, first year advising and support, the dance community, dorm advocacy, cultural clubs, professional clubs, activism, Institute committees, mentorship programs, the first generation and/or low income community, Institute working groups, civic engagement, D-Lab, MISTI, the innovation community, and much more. There are very few people as passionate as we are about the range of people and communities on this campus. The reach and range we now have to understand campus is expansive because of it, because we have been seeking it throughout her time at MIT, not simply in time of election.
Between the both of us, we have earned the MIT First Year Leadership Award, the BSU Vibranium Award for freshman leadership, and the BWA Freshman Leadership Award. Keep in mind, these are all from our first year on campus, as coronavirus has postponed many awards seasons for this year. We have also worked closely with Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, the Institute Community Equity Office, the Office of Minority Education, the Office of Multicultural Programming, MIT Police, S^3, the PKG, the Committee on Undergraduate Admission and Financial Aid, the Indigenous People’s Advocacy Committee, the Student Organizations Leadership Committee, the First Generation and/or Low Income Working Group, the Office of Engineering Outreach Programming, the Burton Conner Transition Team, the Division of Student Life, including Suzy Nelson, David Friedrich, and Judy Robinson, and more.
This expansive list still fails to encompass the impact we have had, from Danielle’s contribution to the abolishment of subject tests in Undergraduate Admissions to the visibility Yu Jing has raised for the US Census on campus, nor the role we have had in MIT and our communities’ responses to COVID-19. Danielle was actually one of the Officers to advocate for MIT to adopt lenient grading policies, and Yu Jing was active in accumulating resources for the First Generation and/or Low-Income community as part of the FGLI Coalition Exec (CASE, Questbridge, FGP), working with the ARM Coalition throughout, as well as in protecting Burton Conner communities in discussions about this coming school year where Burton Conner may stay open.