Fall 2024 / The Whole Student Experience

A Desire “to Make Change on the Issues I Care About”

Iselle Barrios ’25 looks to apply her STEM knowledge at the policy level

Iselle Barrios’s passion for the environment deepened when she took two intensive classes at the MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science semester program during high school.

 
“I wanted to apply to MIT because of that experience,” she says. Once accepted, she participated in Interphase EDGE/x, a two-year program that provides a summer session as well as programming during the academic year that gives students a launch pad for the college experience. Financial support from the Robert T. Haslam Scholarship Fund, she says, was also instrumental to bringing her to MIT. “I could not have attended MIT without the scholarship, so I’m extremely grateful for that.”

Terrascope and sustainability solutions

Before coming to MIT, I became interested in looking at what can we do about climate change to mitigate its impact. I was able to start that right away in Terrascope, a learning community where about 50 first-years take a class that gives them a complex sustainability challenge. The first couple of weeks have some structure, but after that, it’s up to you as a class how you want to approach the challenge. Students are given the kind of autonomy that you don’t normally get in a first-year class. You learn a lot about the subject area, but also how to work with other people and consider different angles of a problem. I’ve enjoyed coming back to work as an undergraduate teaching fellow for the last couple of years.

Anthropology pivot

One anthropology class, 21A.S01 Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, totally changed my outlook. The class focuses on the air pollution levels in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, which are over 100 times the World Health Organization’s recommended level. We worked with the idea of a molten salt heat brick which you could fuel by using waste heat from the coal-burning power plants and traveled to Mongolia during the following Independent Activities Period. The trip included some testing but it mostly focused on talking to people who live in the affected districts, policymakers, and all kinds of stakeholders, getting a bunch of different viewpoints on the issue. I had never been exposed to anthropology before, but that perspective has been incredibly valuable for me.

Exploring policy in Washington, DC

During my time at MIT, I’ve become interested in a career in policy and trying to make change on the issues that I care about—not necessarily in a hard science and technology career, but using the STEM background that I have in a more social science-type of field. I enrolled in the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program, which is designed to expose MIT students to the policy environment in Washington, DC, in the summer of 2024. One of the big components is an internship at a policy-related organization. I had an internship at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was a great fit for my interests—I could see more clearly how my scientific background could potentially come into play at the policy level.