I was a child with never-ending questions. At times when my mom couldn’t answer me with her two jobs, the city library has been my place to spend the afternoons. Across pages, I imagined myself as a crime scene detective or an interspace traveler, cruising through time dimensions.
In those worlds, fantasy or real, I had my original questions generating new ones, big asks about why and how the world works. In high school, I was introduced to Computer Science and realized the joy of building a program that "spits out" calculation results. Aside from asking big questions, I stayed up at night wondering what tech and programming can do.
However, it turned out that I don't know how to ask questions - more exactly, I don't know how to ask questions that invite everyone who might hold the answer. I thought I would be the only one who holds the answer, while the truth is that we are interconnected, and every single person in this world is valuable in their own way.
Therefore, a better question to ask is the one starting with "how might we". Throughout my time at Umich, I found these questions compelling and powerful across different research and work projects. How might we work as a mentoring team to better facilitate the virtual research seminars in MRADS, a living-learning community for first-year students? How might we utilize culture-based STEM concepts for artisans and students in underserved communities? How might we start a campus-wide discussion about tech and society, while creating a community based on care and support?
Turns out that, as cliché as it sounds, teamwork makes the dream work. At my part-time job in the Office of Student Life research and assessment, a central question that was asked daily - how could the campus be more inclusive and welcoming? How could we invite everyone to this campus and make every one of them included, providing a safe and thriving environment for every student to succeed? How could we inform future programs and incorporate perceptions into the programmings, engineer, and improve their experiences spent at Michigan? To answer those questions, students are invited to take part - because they hold the answers. Through pilot testing using qualitative interviews and a thereafter survey sent to tens of thousands of students, the research can better inform the answer that the campus needs.
And moving forward, I will keep asking those 'how might we's.
