November 2020

You know how important learning outside the classroom is to the Carnegie Mellon experience. More than ever, the generosity of our community is making rich educational opportunities possible for Tartans around the world.

Thanks to our supporters, students are making real impact through virtual internships, taking scientific research into the cloud to accelerate breakthroughs and leveraging their creativity to serve nonprofits.

Read on to discover how the CMU community is changing students’ lives — so they can change the world.

As the coronavirus pandemic affected businesses and nonprofits across the country, many Carnegie Mellon University students were left scrambling when their summer internship offers suddenly fell through.

Read the story to learn how two colleges — and their generous supporters — helped connect students with opportunities to apply their education to real-world challenges, all from a safe distance.

To make these opportunities possible:

• Donors offered financial support so that each student intern could receive a modest stipend for housing, food and other basic needs.
• Corporate partners worked with Heinz College to identify specific projects students could tackle remotely. 
• The Block Center for Technology and Society sponsored a summer competition for students to develop entrepreneurial ideas in a team setting.
• Heinz College faculty members offered more than 30 students the chance to conduct research in lieu of a traditional internship.

Thanks to generous support from the CMU community, 10 students — and counting — have had the chance to use their skills to have a positive impact on nonprofit organizations.

The Creative Good Fund provides each ETC student with a stipend to cover living expenses, removing financial barriers to professional development opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach.

We recently caught up with Daryl Choa, who earned her master’s degree in entertainment technology in 2020, to learn about her 2019 experience at Two Bit Circus Foundation in California.