Designing a career, on and off the track, at MIT

You will never catch Krystal Montgomery running to class. Literally. She is that fast.

The MIT senior — a Course 6-3 (Computer Science and Engineering) major and Course 4 (Design) minor — was recently named the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference Women’s Track Athlete of the Week — for the second time. Montgomery ran a national top 10 time in the 800 meters at the Friar Invitational in Providence, Rhode Island, in April. Her time of 2:10.67 was the fastest Division III runner in the field, ranking her eighth nationally. She beat that time with a personal best (2:09.51) at the FIRE Meet hosted by Williams College in early May. 

Montgomery also runs the 400 meters or 800 meters on the relay team; last year, she and her teammates were national champions in the 4x400m race, which helped MIT win its first NCAA Division III Outdoor National Championship. 

Her success running at MIT was hard-fought. After a stellar undergraduate first year and earning a place at the NCAA Division III finals, she suffered an injury at the NCAA Division III Indoor Championships. Unable to compete at the start of her second year, the increasing demands of her coursework and interviewing for internships took a toll.

“Sophomore year was super tough, academically,” says Montgomery. “I think the mental load affected my athletic performance. I was thinking that I would quit after my sophomore year and just focus on school. Then I started dropping times and thought that maybe I could improve if I just stuck it out.”

What Montgomery found was a new way to focus on herself that positively impacted her work on and off the track.

“It’s definitely been a journey of learning how to be more mentally tough throughout the last four years,” she says. “I think that has kind of helped both my academic and athletic performances. My junior year was great. I just kept pushing myself and continued to drop my times. I kind of learned how to balance my life. I prioritized sleeping and eating and tried not to be too stressed about schoolwork so I could lock in on race day.”

Supporting creative energy

Montgomery says she was a “pretty crafty person” before attending MIT. The former president of her high school’s chapter of Girls Who Code, she knew she was going to major in computer science. It was her love for building, making, and creating that led her to explore design courses. In her first year, Montgomery took her first design class 4.021 (Design Studio: How to Design), with Paul Pettigrew. 

“That was an amazing experience because I got to use the workshops and the labs in the architecture department,” she says. “It was just crazy to have all these materials at my fingertips that I could build with. I learned how to laser cut; spray paint; powder coat; and cut metal, wood, and fabric. I found it all really interesting, and what I made encouraged me to take more of these classes.”

Montgomery says she realized that pursuing her interest in design while majoring in computer science would allow her to foster her “creative energy” throughout her time at MIT.

In her junior year, Montgomery took class 4.031 (Design Studio: Objects and Interaction) with associate professor of the practice in architecture Marcelo Coelho. She enjoyed it so much she took another of Coelho’s courses, 4.043 (Design Studio: Interaction Intelligence) — twice.

The course provides a foundation in technical skills such as physical prototyping, coding, collecting data, and deploying neural network models. The end result is developing interactive prototypes that can be deployed and experienced by real users. Montgomery enjoyed the process of working with a new group of classmates and partnering to create a prototype in each class. 

“[Coelho’s] classes have been a great combination of designing a physical object and learning how to code, which brought in my computer science background,” says Montgomery. “It gave me the opportunity to combine both fields creatively.”

Moving forward

Montgomery says she hasn’t fully wrapped her head around the fact that her time at MIT is ending. It’s all been good: friends, clubs, courses. 

“My last two years, I chose to focus on memories instead of being stressed over a lot of things,” she says. “I feel like I chose each of the things I did intentionally, so I put my time in things that I’ll carry with me past college.”

Before Commencement, Montgomery will join her teammates in her final meet: the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships. At last year’s championships, Montgomery and her teammates took first place in the women’s 4x400m relay. 

After Commencement, Montgomery will move to Austin, Texas to work as a software developer at Apple, and she will keep competing in track as an unattached athlete, potentially transitioning to marathons later in her career. 

“I’ve seen a lot of post-grads from MIT continue to train and compete in track meets and perform even better than they did in college,” says Montgomery. “I don’t know when I’ll make the switch to longer-distance running. For now, the sweet spot is the 800 meters.”

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Bridging real human movement with digital technology

“Avatar,” the highest-grossing film of all time, took viewers to a new world, Pandora, and it advanced filmmaking to its own new world: developing the field of virtual production. 

Leveraging a wide range of technologies such as performance capture, LED virtual environments, and advanced 3D imaging technologies, virtual production is changing the landscape of modern cinema. While millions of people have seen “Avatar,” only a fraction of that number understand the magic behind the scenes. Exposing filmmaking students to this magic is what MIT Media Lab alumnus Daniel Pillis SM ’24 is all about.

“Motion capture, like that in 'Avatar,' bridges real human movement with digital technology,” says Pillis. “In this digital age, and as artificial intelligence becomes more involved in film studios, technology that enables the authenticity of human expression and performance is becoming increasingly important.” 

That is what Pillis, now an assistant professor at Emerson College, teaches his students in his filmmaking courses. To bring the lesson to life, each semester the class travels across the river to MIT, where Emerson undergraduate and graduate students use the capabilities of the MIT.nano Immersion Lab to create their own virtual productions.

Donning full-body motion-capture suits that pair to the 28-camera OptiTrack system in the Immersion Lab, the students become their own avatars — generating virtual characters that dance, fight, or play the guitar like The Beatles. They see their animation data immediately on a computer screen and can change or add to their character’s movements in real time. Later, they take their data back to Emerson to build into short films for their final projects.

“It has been truly gratifying to support this course and to see the curiosity and ingenuity students have brought to the stage,” says Talis Reks, who manages the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. “This class highlights the range of what our lab can offer, extending well beyond research and into art and the performing arts."

The MIT.nano Immersion Lab — there’s really nothing else like it

Pillis first learned about the MIT.nano Immersion Lab during his time as a graduate student in Professor Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media group at the MIT Media Lab. Working with colleague Georine Pierre SM ’24, the two collaborated on a Haitian folklore dance project, creating a motion capture-driven simulation of Haitian folkloric dance traditions, specifically the sacred Yanvalou dance. They built a living archive using the capabilities of the Immersion Lab that let participants dance with an interactive AI-driven ancestral avatar animation.

When he became faculty at Emerson, Pillis knew the Immersion Lab was a perfect fit to elevate his students’ experiences. “The level of high-end film production that the Immersion Lab supports is out of reach for so many students who would benefit from this technology in their practice,” explains Pillis. “The facility is unique, well-equipped, and even accessible to those outside of MIT — there really is nothing else like it in the Boston area.”

With the type of mechanical character animation the Immersion Lab technology allows, the final projects end up light-years beyond what these students thought they could achieve, continues Pillis. And they’re having fun. “They really get into it,” says Reks. “These students are not necessarily trained as actors, but the moment they see themselves as virtual characters, the realistic, granular movement enabled by motion capture, they get fully into performing.”

Rewarding professionalism

In the past two years, over 60 Emerson College students have used the Immersion Lab for Pillis’ class. Emerson undergraduate student Nick Forsch received an EVVY Award nomination for his project. The Emerson version of an Emmy, EVVYs are awarded to students whose projects are judged and selected by a panel of industry experts looking for creativity, quality, and professionalism.

“Being able to use the MIT.nano Immersion Lab really elevated my project,” says Forsch who created “Enter,” a short film about a human transported into a digital world to meet an artificial intelligence. “I was excited to submit it for an EVVY, knowing the technology behind my work was on a professional level.”

Another undergraduate student, Evan Costa, recently created a virtual recreation of The Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” capturing a version of each musician’s performance and reconstructing a simulation of 1950s television. Costa will be joining the MIT Learning Engineering and Practice Group, led by principal research scientist John Liu in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, this summer to continue exploring virtual production as an intern.

“Having the opportunity to gather motion-capture data within the Immersion Lab gave me more than advanced technology for my project; it provided insight into an often-unseen world of creativity,” says Costa. “Modern storytelling exists across a wide range of mediums, from film to video games, and witnessing the inner workings of this process has deepened my passion for virtual production.”

In the coming academic year, Pillis and Reks plan to leverage advanced Immersion Lab technologies to teach facial animation, hand and finger tracking, multi-modal data capture, and further advances in interactive generative motion capture as they gear up for the next set of productions.

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A day in the life of MIT Sloan Fellow Alecia Asiamigbe

“I came to MIT Sloan intent on joining a vibrant ecosystem for entrepreneurship and leadership development,” says Alecia Asiamigbe, an MIT Sloan Fellow and MBA student in the MIT Sloan School of Management who is graduating this week.

Before coming to MIT Sloan, Asiamigbe worked as an energy and infrastructure professional with over 20 years of leadership experience, delivering complex energy infrastructure solutions.

It was MIT Sloan’s work to embed sustainability in new ventures that attracted Asiamigbe. Additionally, the MIT Sloan Fellows program gave her the opportunity to earn an MBA in one year. “I was anchored to my choice by the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework and the potential to focus on climate and energy entrepreneurship.”

Currently, Asiamigbe is working to build out a sustainability-focused venture, Resilient Grid, a renewable energy company that aims to convert organic waste into sustainable natural gas able to produce reliable, dispatchable renewable power in fuel import-dependent markets. Its modular systems reduce reliance on imported fuels, lower energy costs, and stabilize grids where solar and wind alone are insufficient. By capturing methane, diverting waste from landfills, and producing useful byproducts, it delivers measurable impact across energy security, emissions reduction, and circular economic development.

“My work in sustainability is deeply rooted in my need to give back to the community and to be an agent for systems-level change. We must solve the dual challenge of providing access to opportunities to innovate and build for those not currently in the loop, while also stopping the damage currently being done to the planet. Knowing that we want better for our grandchildren, what will we do differently?”

The following photo gallery provides a snapshot of what a typical day for Asiamigbe has been like at MIT.

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One stage at a time

In a theater, the first thing the audience sees, and looks at the longest, is the stage. Even so, set design is something most of us know little about. Why does a set have its form and elements? How does it suit the performance? 

Consider a set that designer and MIT Associate Professor Sara Brown created in 2015, when the Brooklyn of Academy of Music adapted the canonical Japanese Noh play “Hagoromo,” turning it into a chamber opera with dance. 

Noh plays have a traditional structure and a crucial final transformation. In “Hagomoro,” an angel loses her cloak; a fisherman only reluctantly returns it, after the angel performs a ritual dance; the angel then ascends to the heavens. To focus on the main characters, Brown’s design featured three high walls surrounding center stage, with musicians and a chorus elevated behind them. 

“That set was a framing device more than anything else,” says Brown, who is also associate head of MIT’s Music and Theater Arts program. “It lifted the musicians to a different plane, almost a heavenly place, so we have a heaven-and-Earth contrast. It allows the dancers to be seen against a plain backdrop. I didn’t want to lose their bodies in a sea of other bodies.”

For a formal play structure, then, Brown created a formal setting, with vertical layering suggestive of its contents. The trickiest part was lighting: Brown worked with the lighting designer Clifton Taylor to cut vents in the high walls for more light, while a rigging structure allowed them to spotlight dancers.

“Solving for those things is what makes the design,” Brown says. “There’s an artistic idea that underbeds everything, and there are practical considerations, which are as important, to make the piece work the way you want.”

Brown has designed sets at many major venues, tackling everything from “Carmen” to “Death of a Salesman” and debut productions. She ranges broadly across theatrical genres, while teaching classes that get MIT students thinking visually, intellectually, and creatively.

“Every play you’re working on should have something you grab onto as a creative challenge,” Brown says. That challenge is a collective one; it involves working with directors, performers, and design teams focused on lighting, sound, media, and costumes.

“In theater-making, you have to work in a community,” Brown emphasizes. “You might bump up against some rough edges, but you develop strategies to work with everybody with dignity, and that’s important.”

For her extensive work and teaching, Brown received tenure at MIT last year. 

Minnesota kind

Brown grew up in Minnesota, where her parents made sure the whole family grasped the value of humility. 

That experience, says Brown, has given her “a voice I carry with me that channels my family. The worst thing you could be where I grew up was too big for your britches. So it’s a voice that says, ‘What are you doing and what is the value of this?’ Because of my upbringing and my family, it’s a kind voice, but it is a self-reflection I try to carry with me.”

Brown received her BA from Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, then earned an MFA from the University of Virginia. At MIT, she has successfully combined professional set design with classroom teaching.

When Brown agrees to design the set for a production, the first thing she does is read the work in question. Then she sits down with the director to talk about it.

“Usually I’ll talk to the director after my first read of the play,” Brown says, citing the influence of a prominent U.S. set designer, the late Skip Mercier. “He said the only thing he brings to the first meeting is a love of the play. That is a great approach. You come understanding the material, wanting to find something within it you love and are excited to work on. You’re not closed; you’re there to discover what you have in common.” 

Indeed, Brown emphasizes how much she appreciates the collaborative aspects of theater. Inevitably, directors, designers, and actors will not agree on everything, but from sorting through those varying viewpoints, a production emerges. 

“It’s about serving the whole instead of being your personal project,” Brown says. “There will always be tension, but the idea is that through that tension, something is going to result that will be better than anything you could do by yourself.”

Brown does have some creative tendencies that reappear across productions. She will often opt for simplicity and adaptability on stage. For a production of “Pride and Prejudice” in Hartford, Connecticut, Brown designed a circular space at the front of the stage, with a slightly elevated rear area containing a piano and columns, allowing the set to shift among the many social settings of the work. 

Remarkably, another set Brown designed was actually used for two different plays running at the same time: “Death of a Salesman” and “Skeleton Crew,” a 2008 play about a closing auto plant in Detroit.

“A throughline in my work is that I gravitate to things that appear to have a simplicity and integrity or formalism, and then reveal different aspects of themselves, so they change over time,” Brown says. “But there is something essential in them. I’m drawn to simplicity, something without a lot of noise.”

“Where the good stuff is”

Still, Brown is always open to new challenges. She once designed the set for the contemporary play “The Lily’s Revenge,” which has five acts and requires the audience to move around in the theater.

“You have to figure out how to reconfigure the space in many different ways with the available materials and it has to feel like a big transformation,” Brown says. “Sometimes you’re working on things and don’t understand the totality of it [the production] until you step back and see it all together.”

Much as Brown works on a variety of theater projects, she also works with a variety of MIT students, from any given course of study, in the classroom. 

“It’s everybody, which is great,” Brown says. “There are students who did high school theater and people who have never seen a play.”

While teaching classes in the Music and Theater Arts program — which include classes on set design, the foundations of design, and drawing for designers — Brown has also served as a faculty advisor for MIT Morningside Academy of Design, an interdisciplinary hub for design on campus. 

“There’s an underlying process of design that does unite disciplines,” Brown says. Consider set design and architecture, for instance:

“Sometimes in theater you’re trying to make spaces that actually express an inefficiency. You’re creating obstacles for people onstage,” Brown says. By contrast, architects might be trying to get people to flow efficiently through buildings. Still, she adds, “It’s the same process, with different results.” Besides, architects do try to design common spaces, whether atriums, lounges, or meeting rooms, where people stop and interact, mirroring set design to an extent.

In any case, Brown notes, when she is working with MIT students in design classes, she is often “reversing the idea that there’s something external you’re seeking that is the right answer, which I think they’re used to doing in other realms of education.”

Instead, in theater, whether it’s Brown’s own professional work, or a first-time design for a student, she says, “This is a process where you have to mine your interior life and think about what you want to bring out in this event that’s going to happen onstage. That can be scary, but that’s where the good stuff is.”

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Featured video: MIT teachings, free to the world

A new short film from MIT Open Learning explores the origin, influence, and global reach of MIT OpenCourseWare, reflecting on its role in establishing MIT, in 2001, as the first higher education institution to make educational resources freely available to learners across the world.

Part of MIT Open Learning, MIT OpenCourseWare helped spark a global movement that continues to shape how knowledge is shared across the world. The film, titled “The Courage to Be Open: MIT OpenCourseWare and the Democratization of Knowledge,” captures both the vision behind this work and the lasting impact it has had on expanding access to learning at scale.

Video by MIT Open Learning | 15 minutes, 22 seconds

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MIT students study plasma physics beneath Alaska’s aurora

For many graduate students, waking up at noon after a 4 a.m. bedtime is a sign of a night well spent. For a group of MIT students, it was simply the start of their workday — timed not to the sun, but to the aurora.

Their goal was simple: to study plasma phenomena using the aurora borealis as a natural laboratory. The process, less so; working largely in darkness in Fairbanks, Alaska, the students conducted experiments in temperatures that dipped as low as -25 degrees Fahrenheit, using red headlamps for visibility. The sun set before 3 p.m., and even at its warmest, temperatures barely reached 20 F.

The aurora provides a rare opportunity to observe plasma behavior directly, as charged particles that interact with Earth’s magnetic field produce visible, large-scale structures in the night sky. As Fairbanks is situated beneath a region of especially frequent auroral activity, it is one of the most reliable places in the world to observe these phenomena, though the conditions come with real constraints. 

For one thing, the extreme cold directly impacted the instrumentation. “Our laptops went from full battery to nearly empty in 10 minutes because of the cold,” says Leonardo Corsaro, a PhD student in physics at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) at MIT. “We were trying to transfer data as fast as possible before everything shut down; it was a race against time!”

The challenges extended beyond the cold itself. “The cold can be managed,” says Leon Nichols, a PhD student in physics at PSFC. “With good planning, you can stay comfy in -20 F. The real difficulty was movement when deploying cameras far away from the roads. Walking through thick snow can burn up to 900 calories in an hour. We used cross-country skis to access some of the more remote terrain that would have taken hours to reach otherwise.”

But the conditions were more than worth it: During their time in Alaska, the group witnessed the strongest solar storm in the past two decades, bringing the aurora to life in ways few will ever experience. “It felt like we were the only ones there,” Sydney Menne, a PhD student in nuclear science and engineering, recounts, “removed from the Earth and just entirely surrounded by the aurora, fully immersed in it.” 

The team was granted access to observation facilities at Poker Flat Research Range through the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Over the course of the trip, students deployed multiple all-sky camera systems across distances of up to 100 miles, enabling simultaneous observations of auroral structures from different locations. These cameras, which capture 360-degree images of the night sky, were paired with magnetometers to correlate visual auroral features with changes in Earth’s magnetic field. 

By combining spatially distributed imaging with magnetic field measurements, the team aimed to capture how auroral structures change across space, with the long-term goal of supporting three-dimensional reconstructions of the aurora. This year’s campaign also expanded the measurements beyond imaging, using muon detectors to explore possible correlations between visual auroral activity, magnetic field changes, and particle detections, offering a potential window into how high-energy particles in the upper atmosphere relate to visible auroral activity.

Despite decades of study, many aspects of the aurora remain poorly understood, and each observation offers an opportunity to better characterize the behavior of plasma in near-Earth space. The team also observed a pulsating aurora, a relatively rare phenomenon in which strips of light stretching across the sky blink on and off multiple times per second. By combining instruments not traditionally applied to these problems and deploying low-cost systems at scale, the team is exploring new approaches to studying these phenomena. Insights from these observations can help improve our understanding of space weather, including how solar activity affects satellites, communications systems, and power infrastructure on Earth.

For some participants, the experience reshaped how they think about plasma physics itself. Corsaro explains, “In my research, it is easy to associate these phenomena with colorful plots and simulations, losing touch with the physical process. Seeing structures in the aurora, electric currents and flows forming and shifting overhead, brought a sense of reality to those concepts, and served as a reminder that real plasmas are far less neat and intuitive than theory suggests.”

The experience is part of a broader effort. This group of students represented the third iteration of the Geophysical Plasma Observation Expedition (GPOE), a project involving MIT students from the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, along with collaborating departments, that sends a cohort to Fairbanks, Alaska, each year. Faculty members now provide support for the expedition, while continuity is maintained through its student-driven structure, with each cohort including a mix of returning and new participants. The expedition is organized and led entirely by students and operates on an intensive, compressed timeline. Students are responsible not only for data collection, but also for instrument design, site selection, logistics, and post-processing, completing a full research cycle within a matter of months.

This year’s cohort included graduate students Leonardo Corsaro and Leon Nichols of PSFC; Sydney Menne of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering; and Noah Wolfe and Oleksandra “Sasha” Lukina of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. The group was accompanied by Professor Matthew Evans, professor of physics at MIT, who is affiliated with the LIGO Laboratory and the Kavli Institute. 

“This is an opportunity to go from concept to data analysis in just a few months,” says John Ball, a PhD student in nuclear science and engineering at PSFC. “That kind of compressed scientific cycle is rare, especially in our field.”

The program itself has relatively recent and somewhat unusual origins. It began in 2023, when graduate student Shon Mackie, frustrated by the lack of hands-on plasma diagnostic opportunities, noticed the solar cycle was approaching its peak and saw an opportunity to study plasma phenomena more directly. He drafted a short proposal to PSFC leadership, and the response from then-Director Dennis Whyte was two lines: “Sounds cool, literally! PSFC will fund this.” 

Since its launch in 2023, GPOE has evolved from a single-camera effort into a multi-instrument, multi-site campaign with growing participation, with each cohort building on the work of previous years by refining instrumentation, expanding observational coverage, and improving data collection strategies. 

This hands-on, student-driven approach has also created opportunities to extend the experience beyond MIT. In 2024, the program expanded to include a new outreach collaboration with the MIT Museum and the MIT Nord Anglia Collaboration, bringing approximately 65 high school students from around 20 schools worldwide to MIT to help design and build components of the all-sky camera systems used in the field. Working within a set of technical constraints, students developed and tested designs, ultimately producing 13 cameras that were deployed during the Alaska expedition.

The program has also begun to produce results beyond the expedition itself. Students have presented their work at major conferences, including the American Geophysical Union, and published findings in peer-reviewed journals such as Earth and Space Science. The group’s low-cost all-sky camera and magnetometer design is now being adopted by other research teams and community science initiatives, extending its impact beyond MIT.

Beyond its scientific goals, participants emphasized the broader impact of the experience. 

“Standing outside at midnight in Alaska, staring up at sheets of glowing plasma stretching thousands of kilometers across the sky, really brings home just how small and delicate our own place in the universe is,” says Ball. 

As the program continues to grow, students hope to expand both its technical capabilities and its reach, including more permanent instrumentation and expanding outreach partnerships. For many involved, the expedition represents not just a research opportunity, but a reminder of the scale and immediacy of the phenomena they study.

“Science is an adventure,” Corsaro says. “This kind of work reminds you why you became a scientist in the first place.”

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MIT science writing students collaborate with The Associated Press

This spring, six reporters from The Associated Press’ climate desk traveled from cities across the United States to work with students from the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. Students developed and pitched local climate stories, then, over a four-day intensive weekend, worked with visual journalists from the AP to report and produce their pieces. Articles cover a broad spectrum of environmental topics, ranging from area kelp harvests that are used to produce biofuels to efforts to restore cranberry bogs in environmentally friendly ways, and include visual elements, like photography and videography.

The four collaborative pieces include:

• “How a retired cranberry bog helped change the game for wetland restoration,” by Jamie Jiang and Julia Vaz
• “Planes and ships could run on kelp someday, but there are serious hurdles,” by Zoe Beketova and Ana Georgescu
• “Massachusetts is dumping sewage into waterways. Grassroots organizations are fighting back,” by Ashley D’Souza and Lucie McCormick
• “One of America’s oldest weather observatories shows people the science behind our climate,” by Laura Martin Agudelo and Alex Megerle

“This workshop was an intense few days that offered a unique opportunity for MIT journalists to get feedback while in the field, reporting. The students brought enthusiasm and passion to the reporting, heading out before the sun came up and working long into the nights over the weekend for stories in the Boston area and beyond,” says AP’s Climate Photo Editor Alyssa Goodman, the workshop’s lead organizer. “For the AP team members who participated, it was also a rewarding opportunity, allowing us to share our passion for climate storytelling while getting to know these students, watching them build strong stories and gain experiences that will help them as they continue in journalism.”

The collaboration is unique, even among journalism programs. The Associated Press is one of the most prestigious, longest-running news wire services in existence. Nearly 4 billion people worldwide come in contact with AP journalism every day. The publication has won 59 Pulitzer Prizes, including 36 in photojournalism.

MIT student reporters say that the opportunity to directly work with journalists from the AP’s climate team and have their own stories published has been a highlight of their time in the Graduate Program in Science Writing.

“It was great to be in the field with a reporter and photographer from the AP News team, learning directly from her as the reporting unfolded,” says Zoe Beketova, whose story focused on kelp biofuels. “That kind of expertise is difficult to get in a static classroom setting, and I think my team learned a lot.”

Ana Georgescu says that the experience of working with the AP team was “like stepping into a real newsroom.” Georgescu adds that coordinating with AP editors and reporting teams in real time and under tight deadlines provided valuable on-the-ground experience.

“What made the biggest difference for me was being in the field alongside an experienced photojournalist and seeing how they read a scene in practice,” she says. “We were able to get immediate feedback on how we directed subjects, which scenes we chose, and how we integrated photography into the reporting process. That kind of hands-on, in-the-moment experience was incredibly helpful, and it’s made me really excited to keep exploring climate stories, as well as the visual side of journalism.”

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