Institute of Design, IIT

My interest in urban planning is really an interest in how community gets shaped — so when I had the chance to join a research team at IIT's Institute of Design, which teaches strategic design and a systems-thinking approach, I took it. I spent summer 2026 there, five days a week, learning under Dean Mathew and a team of brilliant researchers from Korea, China, India, and Italy. Our group consulted with the Department of Education to modernize NAEP — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal test that measures student achievement across the U.S., known as the "Nation's Report Card." We worked to make the data usable and intuitive to the policymakers, researchers, and superintendents who depend on it.

We applied human-centered design to understand those stakeholders' needs, and hosted a workshop with Harvard professors and senior officials from the National Assessment Governing Board. I was a notetaker and assisted the facilitators, then coded the qualitative data for the team's database.

At the end of the internship, I presented my research — "Fifteen Years of NAEP Scores and Historic Policy Reform" — to contextualize the team's upcoming findings paper.