I am organizing projects with refugee-led organizations and refugee-supporting NGOs on initiatives in higher education, gender equality, and socio-economic inclusions for refugees. I currently serve on the Committee of Advisors for one of the projects run by the World University Service of Canada (WUSC).

My interest in refugees and refugee welfare was sparked by my internship at Building 21, where I decided to base my project on the idea of imagining refugee camps in Kenya as viable cities, rich in innovation and technology.

Though my project was based on imaginations of a time that is half a century away, I realized that some of the ideas can actually be realized in the short term with the right partnerships and investments. I therefore intend to be involved long term on these kinds of projects to see some of the ideas I had imagined at B21 come to life.

My non-profit social enterprise, Water Rangers, is supporting hundreds of communities across Canada to collect baseline water quality for their local waterbodies. We’ve collected over 200,000 data points and trained over 10,000 youth, 90% of which had never tested before. We’re currently working with the University of Regina on a 5-year research study to extend the ideas I developed at Building 21, and we continue to prototype and build tools that help keep people excited and motivated about monitoring. Just this week, we were featured in a campaign for The Centre for Social Innovation; the campaign was designed by Tristan who we met at Building 21.

I think some of the best ideas I’ve seen come from collisions between people from different fields — we each have a unique perspective that can add a different dimension to a question or methodology for developing an answer. I think we need more opportunities for cross fertilisation and that true innovation often grows from asking bold questions, and leverage our different expertise to refine our questions and build solutions. Science demands a rigorous, disciplined approach to experimental design, but I think that tinkering with ideas and having the freedom to see where they can lead and think ‘out of the box’ can yield some of the most exciting possibilities. Its difficult to find opportunities that support and allow you to ‘play in the lab’ and just follow your ideas… B21 totally impacted my path. I met my wonderful co-founder through B21 networks. B21 also gave me a safe space to explore alternative career paths post PhD.

I am a PhD student in Physics at University California, Santa Barbara, one of the top 10 best physics graduate programs in the United States. I study quantitative dance theory using machine learning, specifically asking the question: How can we train a neural network to generate new movement using intention, as it is rigorously defined by dance notation?

I am currently on track to pioneer a new sub-field in the multi-media technological study of dance, and Building 21 is almost entirely responsible for that. It equipped me with the critical thinking skills, the ability to develop and pursue a research program, and, most importantly, the confidence needed to take risks. I am eternally grateful to this organization. I can attest to how much of an impact it has made on my academic career, and know that there are many future students at McGill University who would benefit just as much.

B21 has helped me in thinking out of the box and think in a truly interdisciplinary way. It has helped me understand the beauty in science which I as a social sciences and legal scholar was scared to understand before. B21 always deals with topics which I have not heard of before and engages with them in ways that everyone can understand and appreciate. B21 is an experience and I am grateful to have gotten this opportunity to be associated with it.

I am currently a program assistant at Building 21, where I am mainly involved with the Radical Futures project. We host discussions where we invite people to reflect on the future in new, optimistic, and thorough ways. Recently, we have been discussing the foundations for a better world, that is, the principles that need to be valued and at the core of our human experience in order for our societies to thrive.

A couple of years ago, I was a fellow at B21 and worked on a project on category-learning in autism. Coming from a Cognitive Linguistics background, this project has led me to develop a PhD research proposal on metaphor processing in autism, which was recently accepted by the University of Toronto.

I have always been interested in the autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but given that my research background was in Literature & Linguistics, I don't think I could have had the chance to seriously study ASD if I had not been given the opportunity and support to do a research project at B21. My fellowship has opened new doors for me and has been a great scaffold for my academic aspirations.

I now work as a Research Associate in an international labour union (with 100,000 members in Canada alone) thanks to Building 21 who gave me my start as a researcher of non-traditional subject matter. I have always been invested in the labour movement but never had an opportunity to study its intersections with marginalization and internet access. I have 2 degrees in labour-related topics and was not given the same freedom to explore as I was given at Building 21. Research jobs for such powerful organizations are only granted when an applicant has experience in the field — when an applicant can prove that they know what they’re doing. I was given an opportunity to prove this only because Building 21 recognized the value in my non-traditional idea.

I am currently working as a Trauma Therapist at a non-profit working with survivors of sexual assault. My experience at B21 continues to have a significant impact on how I do the work I do, my relationships to others, and approaches to learning, growth, and healing.

B21 provided me with space, self-trust, connection, and community. Having this experience as a part of my academic world paved a strong foundation for new ways to learn, trust in curiosity, gather information and prioritize creativity. For all this, I am so thankful!

B21 is one of the most special communities I've ever been a part of. It makes space for those of us whose ideas fit outside and between the lines of traditional academic disciplines. For me, it provided financial, academic, and emotional support for a project that I deeply wanted to create, despite the fact that I knew of no other project like it. B21 connected me to tools, experts, and collaborators, and gave me a physical space to make my dream into a real product that people could engage with. I am so deeply grateful for the opportunity B21 created for me.

B21 allowed me to recognize the value of my own creativity and validated my ability to pursue my passion. Without B21, I have no idea if I would have had the confidence to pursue a career in science communication, and I certainly would not have had access to the professional experiences I gained following graduation. When I graduated from McGill in 2020, I was the first among my friends to get a job, even despite the COVID-spurred recession. This is in no small part due to the network and work experience I was able to cultivate at B21. Even now, 4 years after graduating, I continue to pursue creative projects that bridge the fields of art and science; I would not have the same faith in my ability to create were it not for the support I received at B21.

I am more than thankful to the Blue Fellowship program, in which I was able to develop my idea through interactions with other fellows. I don’t know any other place which prompts such fluidity of thoughts, dynamics of collaboration and freedom of direction. These characteristics boosted my personal project “Gamification of Human-Computer Interaction in Audiovisual Performance” without any ideological restriction, and allowed me to have the project outcome performed by other fellows, Eric and Eloise, at the open house. I am sure that something innovative will come out from such environment, and wish a continuous growth of Building 21.

Thank you so much for this amazing experience. I had very high expectations for the BLUE Fellowship and I couldn’t be happier with the results! The environment that you helped to create gathered beautiful ideas, feelings, projects and wishes that will have a life of their own beyond the BLUE initiative. Maybe the part that was especially important for me was the ‘Unconstrained’ part of the BLUE acronym. Having the freedom to work and explore without fixed deliverables or expectations on your side was very liberating and it helped me a lot to take risks and change direction when I wanted to. It is very encouraging to see how you were able to put such a diverse group of people together and made everyone feel comfortable and cared for. I’m going to miss this relaxed way of being productive and creative!

I am completing my Master's in Environmental Management degree in May with a focus on global sustainability and renewable energy transition. My research assesses the feasibility of distributed solar generation in Southwest Colorado: Can we meet our energy needs with local renewables? How much might this cost? Cost and benefit analysis of various energy sources and storage options using HOMER.

Over the past year I have completed a GHG emissions inventory for San Miguel and Ouray County as well as a climate action plan for the same region. My next research/consultant deliverable will be a paper and series of policy briefs exploring the intersection of mineral availability, transition to a green economy, and colonial capitalism. At the very least, my experience at B21 motivated and prepared me to think about challenging systemic issues from a space of curiosity, gratitude, and a cautious optimism. At the very most, B21 provided me with a worldwide network of collaborators and friends. The relationships and conversations shared amongst the network produce an undeniably generative impact.

From the outset, Building 21 has had a profoundly positive impact on my academic trajectory. My project later became my Honours Thesis, an opportunity without which I would not have had access to the competitive scholarships and academic connections upon which I rely on today.

Building 21's interdisciplinary environment encouraged me to explore beyond my academic discipline, which motivated me to pursue graduate degrees in topics external to my undergraduate studies. While I had studied Cultural Anthropology as a BA, I am now enrolled in an MSc in Psychiatry (dealing largely in the neurosciences) at McGill and an MA in Philosophy at the European Graduate School. Both of my Master's theses are to a meaningful extent still dealing with the same questions I had the opportunity to explore in B21 as a research fellow.

I can honestly say the BLUE fellowship is the best - and proudest - thing I’ve ever done. I’m thankful for many reasons, but I am perhaps the most thankful for what B21 manages to be. What Building 21 truly embodies—what might be considered its “spirit” to me at least —is its capturing of true University culture. A culture of conversations, ideas, and dialectics. A culture of philosophy, art, literature and science - both the discrete disciplines and their strange intersections. A culture of truly curious intellectual honesty; of risk and fundamentally of ideas. A culture that taps into the heart of why University is exciting, terrifying and inspiring.

As a BCom graduate who found Landscape Architecture early on her degree, I sought refuge at B21 where I worked on spatial/sustainable projects at my own initiative. With its explorative resources and community support, B21 provided me the creativity that my academic commerce degree could not. Without my experience at B21, I would not have been accepted into (my dream of) Rhode Island School of Design's Master of Landscape Architecture with merit scholarship. It was my time at B21 that granted me the dream opportunities I have now.

I've always wanted to believe that magic existed, and the closest I've come to suspending disbelief has been within Building 21.

It currently serves the essential function of being one of the only places on the planet where no idea is impossible to ponder and no dream is too far out of reach. I still remember the very first time. I know so many lives that have been touched by this space and I cannot recommend it enough to those who may dare to dream.

As I've been reflecting, the B21 experience has genuinely shaped my approach to problem-solving. The skills and mindset that B21 helps cultivate have been incredibly valuable and interesting to apply to my current work as a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab.

I've talked to many of the master's and PhD students here, and it's interesting how much their program resembles the structure of B21 projects, particularly in terms of balancing independent creative freedom with producing tangible outcomes.

Currently I am working on sponging up as much potentially life-saving information as I can during the didactic period of my clinical training. At the same time, I am researching information flow in the brain and how changes in the organ’s features like geometry and in components like cells can give rise to all kinds of debilitating abnormalities in epilepsy.

A conversation about fungi, ants, and consciousness will always be my fondest memory of Building 21. The same way that the intelligence of Nature emerges in the way single creatures behave randomly and intentionally simultaneously, it is always appreciated that when Building 21 begins to chat, boundaries between each of us are broken as we pour our thoughts into an amorphous thought cloud.

I am proud of my B21 project, my contribution to the NeuroTech team, and to weekly brainstorming sessions. It gave me the skills to learn independently and passionately. This is particularly useful to prepare me for a life in academic medicine. The synergy between passionately doing and learning more is so powerful in continuously making the world a better place a little bit at a time.

I am finishing up my MSc in Epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, looking at characterizing the incidence and risk of cardiac arrhythmias and related healthcare access and utilization in Inuit communities in Nunavut. At B21, I was focused on using storytelling to imagine the implications of world in which aging has considerably slowed down, or even ceased. As part of this project, I had to go beyond my known areas of knowledge and try to contextualize different elements of this world and its implications from a societal, cultural and even economic perspective. I feel that my B21 project laid the foundation for the work that I want to develop and contribute to as a researcher. I continue to integrate multidisciplinarity into my work and challenge myself to add an element of going beyond the norm to my projects.

Prior to my time at B21, I was always “scared” to go beyond what I knew. I was very hesitant to explore projects/themes/areas that were beyond what I had formally learnt in school because I was afraid of lacking proficiency and simply not knowing how to do something. Growing up, I had always been one of those people that had to understand or get something right on their first try and if I didn’t, I simply wouldn’t pursue it anymore. My time and work at B21, especially the environment and the warmth of the people I was surrounded with, made me feel very comfortable with not knowing, not having an answer or even knowing how to approach a problem - maybe not even having the skills or background to actually work on my project. Developing that comfort and learning to accept that sometimes there is no right answer, or no right way to approach something has made me much more comfortable as a learner because I no longer approach new topics, ideas or skills with fear, but rather as an opportunity for growth.

I am an LLM student at the McGill University Faculty of Law. In the next few months, I will finish my thesis that explores the essence of judicial automation.

It is still my plan to finish the short story I began at Building 21, plus I now have multiple creative writing projects in mind, including a novel. This novel would be about my recent travels and the role they have played in my intellectual journey.

My experience at Building 21 had a massive impact on my path. It allowed me to "zoom out" of my field (law) to see how science fiction, philosophy and even art can belong in rigorous academic research. Above all, I built a confidence to trust unusual avenues of thought without fear of inappropriateness.

B21 helped me to develop a research proposal out of what had just been a hobby with questions I wanted answers to, such as "What might have Hebrew chant sounded like 2000 years ago?" After the internship, I was ready to apply for the Master's in Science that I am doing now in McGill's Department of Biology, adapting new statistical techniques from Evolutionary Biology and Systematics for use in Historical Musicology.

My project specifically aims at quantifying melodic diversity across all staff-notated transcriptions ever published of Hebrew Cantillation, and model their evolution across the past millennia with reference to historical records of Israelite population-migrations.

I am currently a marketing analyst at an AI firm in New York. BLUE is a place that fosters an environment of new thinkers and like-minded innovators. Through BLUE I met friends that introduced me to the AI world and began my curiosity for what a career in consulting with AI could be. BLUE inspired me to explore new avenues and to invest in my passions. Additionally, I began to work with the MasterCard foundation with McGill. I was first introduced to the organization through colleagues at BLUE and the work I do now helps me tap into work I started research as my thesis in 2020. All this to say I am grateful to what BLUE exposed me to.

I am a junior software developer at a small software company. Building 21 gave me the opportunity to develop a programming project that I referenced extensively in my interview process.

I'm working in business development at a decentralized finance protocol (i.e. a crypto start up). I got my foot in the door primarily via my technical background, but having a unique assortment of disciplinary experience (i.e. B21 research) was noted as a major contributing factor behind the job offer.

I am an academic coach for students with learning disabilities. I also manage a music artist and do freelance copywriting. I'm actually working on pitching an education program to schools and camps that I developed through my MA and my time at B21. It's an embodied sex education program and some of the learning and building I've done at B21 has informed the development. I use the one paper I created at B21 when I'm pitching sometimes to help contextualize the viability of the program.

I am doing a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto.

I think B21 had a significant impact on the way I think about interdisciplinary work, both in terms of its benefits and challenges. The impact on my life has been extremely positive.

I graduated from McGill with distinction a year ago and decided to take a gap year before starting graduate school. In the meantime, I published for the first time (as part of a team), a psychology paper on sleep and dreams during the pandemic, and am aiming to publish a first-author paper from the same project. I have been working as a French teacher in Paris, wrapping up research from my final year at McGill, applying to Master's programs in cognitive science, and releasing music from a new project. The network I grew through B21, as well as the experience of being a BLUE fellow, deeply impacted my current choices in many ways.

Through my experience as a BLUE scholar, I identified how crucial a collaborative intellectual environment made up of passionate, open-minded, and highly intellectually motivated peers and mentors is to my well-being and sense of meaningful work. This has helped me focus on graduate programs that value excellence through innovation, collaboration, and passion rather than cookie-cutter performance. In fact, I found these programs thanks to the many conversations I have had, this past year, with academics connected to my field of interest who I either met during my time as a BLUE fellow or connected with via mentors from B21. I cannot overemphasize the importance that mentorship from such generous, successful researchers has had for me.

Before BLUE, I knew I was deeply attracted to research but doubted myself, mainly because I wasn't sure I could make it work while being neuroatypical, interdisciplinary to my core, and dependent on the conversational mode to figure my ideas out. It is not so much that I met people like me at B21 as that I experienced an incredible diversity of thinking and learning styles, personal histories, and interests, not to mention the most intellectually dazzling and motivated crowd I had the luck of finding during my time at McGill. Almost every person who mattered to my development as a student and young graduate has at some point become tied to B21, as a mentor, a student, or both. I only wish I had had these opportunities earlier during my time at McGill, which likely would have saved me significant doubts, about myself and the institution alike. I sincerely hope that students will keep benefiting from this environment for a long time.

After B21, I went on to become a lead research assistant with a Harvard Professor on key housing policy issues. One of the observations I made during that project prevented the city from building an incredibly expensive, irreversible, and ineffective housing program which would have neglected key living needs of low income household participants. Without B21 I would have never had the confidence nor the interdisciplinary research experience to take that opportunity up.

Having completed BLUE at B21 so early on, when no one else would have invested in me, allowed me to gain far more out of my classes. I now have advanced exposure to a vast array of topics from micro to macro coming out of undergrad, including behavioural and political economy. Most undergrads only have a dent into one when they consider graduate school after doing an undergraduate thesis.

After completing BLUE, I also have the interdisciplinary communication experience to be able to carefully and correctly communicate what I have learned to those outside of my field, in addition to having the self confidence to communicate when I do not know about a topic. Areas I have the potential to develop are integrating technology into economic models (increasing outputs without increasing inputs) as well as building up what scarce literature we have on disability programs, following the consequences of long-covid and mental health challenges in a post-COVID-19 world.

BLUE is the reason why I didn’t transfer. It gave me a community of brilliant people who want to learn for the sake of learning. BLUE gave me a space to blossom when I wasn’t able to fit into the tight boxes of the mainstream. I got to learn more about something I cared about. Doing BLUE at the beginning gave me a socio-academic foundation I wouldn’t have necessarily gotten at another school. I felt like I was in free fall and BLUE was the beanstalk I grabbed onto so that I could keep on climbing. I also realized what research was actually like and built something that I made myself. I was able to step back in awe that I came up with the question and was doing highly advanced work. Suddenly all my schoolwork seemed easy and it put things in perspective in a way another program wouldn’t necessarily do.

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There are many spaces in the university ecosystem that teach students how to contain themselves and their ideas to match the status quo. B21, instead of teaching students to be contained, encourages them to push outwards, express their ideas, and make new connections.

B21 is distinctive because it manages to be simultaneously rigorous and free, both radical and welcoming, at once wildly exploratory and close to home. Higher education, at its best, is about diligently finding and surpassing the boundaries of truth and knowledge. B21 is a place where higher education actually fulfills this lofty ideal and provides an environment for students to truly explore, collaborate, and invent.

After three years in higher education, B21 was the first place where I felt truly welcome and encouraged to investigate. It is only in this sort of environment where the world's most challenging problems can be approached and solved.

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B21 is a haven for open minds, free thought and creative expression. It's an intimate space where curious souls can find friendly faces, and interesting and infinitely imaginative conversation. My experience at B21 last year opened a new world, one where my mind was free to roam through all the wild ideas and explore them in a safe and non-judgemental setting. This opportunity opened up a new and more conscious way of being in the world and in my mind, and a new approach to research. It gave me tools to liberate self-imposed constraints and discover the ways you can freely create how you exist in the world and therefore contribute to it. At B21, conversation and dialog contemplates any and all subjects with delicacy and tact - from the sublime to the concrete - using mental tools ranging from the analytical to the associative. The connections made across disciplines, paradigms and cultures at B21 are necessary for open science to thrive. And in open, relational spaces such as these, perennial philosophies bloom.

I am incredibly thankful to have found this safe and protected space, and I'm especially grateful for the guidance I received through Ollivier's socratic questioning, Anita's patient and understanding ear, and Alex's creative insights. I am not sure I would have been able to progress in my PhD had I not been given an opportunity to freely and independently explore. B21 creates a space of universal learning, curiosity and dialog that a university, to be a university, can't be without.

My B21 project, which focused on researching an popular social competition phenomenon in China, has lead me to a continued exploration of socioeconomic determinants that influence the distribution of social resources and capital. Through the working progress of weekly lightening session and the final report, I can say, that B21 project expanded my understanding of economics beyond the confines of textbook theories and formulas.

This year, I completed my research project on electricity poverty in rural Kenya. My analysis considered both social and economic dimensions, utilizing data analysis and computational modeling to gain comprehensive insights into this complex issue. Those incremental success stimulates me to undertake further research projects within the realm of economics.

During my time at B21, I noticed a significant enhancement in my ability to think spontaneously. I attribute this improvement to the weekly lightening talks where students or scholars with diverse academic background are gathered at Building 21 to share insights about their projects. These gatherings provided me with the invaluable opportunity to immerse myself in an intellectually stimulating environment. I found myself surrounded by individuals who shared a deep appreciation for knowledge, fostering an atmosphere of inherent acceptance and contemplation of ideas and information. This skill is invaluable for my research in economics, which demands both in-depth thinking and thorough exploration of complex problems.

I am currently completing my undergraduate degree at McGill, majoring in neuroscience and minoring in computer science and math. I'd never really done a self-directed project until BLUE/B21. Going through the experience with the rest of the BLUE cohort and learning how to do research on my own gave me the confidence and push I needed to pursue a year-long research course this year.

My project at BLUE was about machine learning and music therapy, and in the future, I want to continue pursue research in the field of AI applications in healthcare. In fact, my BLUE project inspired me to do my current year-long research project on identifying epilepsy biomarkers using machine learning!

I am currently finishing my last semester as an undergrad in the BCom program at McGill. This coming Fall, I will be attending an MA in Philosophy at King’s College London and I intend to continue to a PhD in philosophy afterwards. I believe that B21 had a significant impact on my future path.

In my second year at McGill, I came to feel that business was not for me. Building 21 gave me an excellent opportunity to develop my intellectual interests and, in doing so, to reflect upon what my direction would be in the future if it was not business. I am confident that I would not have found what was right for me early enough to have been able to pursue it if it was not for the support, advice, and opportunity that B21 offered me during my time there in 2020.

When I started my BLUE fellowship, I had taken only two courses that were specific for my major and one in my minor. The fellowship let me frame questions regardless of my program. It empowers students to use their pool of knowledge and seek new information for their inquiries, rather than fit their activities to converge onto their primary studies. The experience also reminds me to stay humble as I gain more expertise. Right now I am close to completing my bachelor's studies in Cognitive Science and History & Philosophy of Science. Themes from the summer cohort come to my thoughts from time to time to this day. I am still part of the B21 community, too!

Let me also say a word about not just the BLUE Fellowship but B21 as a whole. Until I started university, I had this romantic view of universities as places where intellectually oriented people discussed big and fascinating ideas simply for the sake of knowledge, debate and curiosity.

While this may never have existed in real universities, it somehow exists here, at B21 and I can’t put into words how much that means to me. So, for this too, thank you. The BLUE Fellowship was a wonderful and valuable experience for each of us and I can’t thank you enough. I had so much fun, met so many amazing mentors and peers who are both friends and inspirations to me, all this on top of having an experience that has profoundly changed my life.

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