When MIT mechanical engineering student Daphne Wang arrived for a summer internship at the Muscogee Creek Nation Department of Health in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she expected to write code. Instead, she spent weeks analyzing tribal history and the cultural dimensions of technical innovation. Together with AI and decision‑making major Lucy Sun, Wang helped build the Muscogee Nation’s first Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), conducting literature reviews, dataset analysis, and survey design while respecting tribal data sovereignty and governance structures. Wang now believes such interdisciplinary exposure should be required for every student in the United States because it teaches technology to serve communities and cultivates a global perspective.
Wang and Sun were two of ten MIT undergraduates selected for the PKG Center for Social Impact’s Code.Tulsa program. Funded by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the program places students at the University of Tulsa for the summer, where they intern with the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations as well as local nonprofits Black Tech Street and Urban Coders Guild, working on AI, data‑science, and other technical projects. PKG assistant dean for community‑based programs Vippy Yee provides historical and cultural context for tech development in the Tulsa region, helping students blend an engineer’s problem‑solving approach with a humanist lens.
The program was conceived by sophomore Jack Carson, an EECS student from Tulsa and a member of the Cherokee Nation. Noticing that rural Native students often lack access to STEM education, Carson proposed a week‑long STEM camp at the University of Tulsa. With help from Harvard student Allie Zong, the Tulsa Advanced Sciences Camp (TASC) selected 25 high‑schoolers from ten tribes and offered intensive tracks in AI engineering, DNA technology, physics, chemistry, and energy, complemented by philosophical workshops that encourage ambitious, deliberate thinking. Participants reported that TASC expanded their sense of impact by a factor of a thousand and inspired several to apply to MIT. Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. reminded the campers that technology can be used for good, urging them to bend its arc toward positive outcomes.
After the internship, many students felt their public‑purpose compass had been recalibrated. Computer science and engineering junior Elvis Chipiro reflected that social impact is embedded in everyday engineering choices, not a separate add‑on. Electrical engineering student Chenise Harper said Code.Tulsa reminded her why she chose MIT—to help others. Review