BLUE Residency
Please write to us if you have any additional questions.
What is the BLUE Residency?
We want to hear from those of you who are passionate about ideas, projects, processes that do not fit within conventional research domains.
Beautiful, Limitless, Unconstrained Exploration (BLUE) is an approach to research Building 21 has developed and refined over the last 8 years. We believe there are vast amounts of knowledge that rests beyond what is conventionally recognized. We developed BLUE to facilitate scholars of all levels, backgrounds, and disciplines to discover that knowledge.
The BLUE Residency supports students who are dedicated to pursue an original project that falls outside of traditional research paradigms. By being a resident, students receive space, an interdisciplinary scholar community, mentorship, access to networks, and training to develop their research at Building 21.
Each winter semester, we grant 15 - 20 residencies to build an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars that apply the BLUE model to daring and unconventional research. Together, we believe we can uncover new perspectives, methodologies, and paradigms for a better future.
Details
Position type
Research resident
Cohort size
15-20 residents
Duration
January 2025 - April 2025
Who
Open to all McGill students of all levels (undergraduate, master's, PhD, post-doc) who are in good academic standing and to students who have graduated from McGill in the past 12 months.
This is not for credit.
*This year, BLUE is an unpaid residency where select students will receive compensation in the form of exclusive access to top executives from MILA, Google Deepmind, Microsoft, The Government of Quebec, and other connections through the BLUE Residency.
The Program
Function
Develop one’s personal, original, creative, and rigorous academic project in order to acquire the knowledge and skills to think beyond the acknowledged, the recognized, and the comfortable.
Requirements
10 - 15 hours of physical presence at Building 21 per week across
- Doing research in the space
- Project check-ins
- Weekly Lightning sessions
- Training workshops
- Regularly scheduled talks and events
In-person presence at B21 leads to essential interdisciplinary connections and conversations.
Responsibility
To cultivate a community of scholars aligned with the BLUE ethos, we ask you to:
- Talk to other scholars about your project
- Develop your project in the space
- Present your project with the community
- Share ideas and feedback with a group of interdisciplinary scholars
- As an aspect of the residency, students may be asked to participate in Building 21 initiatives or host scholar events
See: Our philosophy of education
Showcase
Scholars will be asked to present their work to the community at the end of the residency in a project showcase.
Inspiration
We are open to all imaginings from different backgrounds and expertises.
Here are some projects we loved. Projects can be entirely domain-specific, or an interdisciplinary mix.
- Su Yu Ding: Recalculating the Cosmological Constant (2018)
- Ève-Marie Marceau & Antoine Pouline: Detecting the sublime in poetry using mathematics (2023)
- Mathilde Papillon: Understanding the Double Rigid Pendulum with Laban’s Dance Theory (2019)
- Mohamed Debbagh: Simulating digital plant growth using generative models (2024)
- Alex Nicholas Chen: Can there be a slow social media? (2023)
- Bior Ajak: Refugees of the Future (2020)
- Claudia Reihert: Designing experiments to understand feature hierarchies in Autism Spectrum Disorder (2020)
- Adam Ghadi-Delgado: Crafting a manifesto for sustainable architecture (2020)
- Alyssa Coghlin: Creating workshops to ground social work language in embodied practices (2020)
- Minju You: Investigating memories and dreams through indigenous narratives, films, and discussions (2021)
- Émile Chamberland: Exploring fungi intelligence through parallels with human and natural systems (2022)
Eligibility and requirements
How to submit a successful application
Applicants will be asked to ‘wow’ the selection committee in the manner they prefer. This means choosing whatever platform they feel will best highlight both their ideas and personal strengths (video, text, music, filmed performance, unusual and original research work, etc.).
The application should show the originality and boldness of the idea submitted and the technical capacity of the applicant to make progress. We are looking for students who are passionate, engaged, autonomous, and are obsessed with knowledge, learning, and discovery. Think about the question or the unknown that you are trying to get at, and articulate it in your application.
Important: articulate the unknown that you're trying to uncover as clearly as you can!
Due to the expected large volume of applications, please aim for maximum impact and clarity as opposed to detail. We strongly recommend keeping videos and similar applications to be viewed within 3-5 minutes.
If you are shortlisted, we may call you for an interview where you are expected to explain your rationale for applying, and your overall goals.
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