Alum Yema Yang '19, who concentrated in Critical Mental Health Studies, writes about the application process for an academic internship. Read the full piece below: - Called “Connecting the Dots: Mental Illness, Media, and Social Change,” my academic internship [with the national Project LETS organization] explored the conceptualization and experience of mental illness and how that could be shifted through digital media as a form of social change. More specifically, I aimed to challenge the existing conversations and perceptions of mental illness through an online webcomic. I wanted to showcase my own narrative as a mentally ill/psychiatrically disabled, first-generation Asian American woman, but in a more intersectional, critical, and accessible (both in terms of medium and language) way.
The academic part of the AI came in through the research. I used academic investigation into Mad Studies, Disability Studies, Media Studies, history, and more to back up how I would display and convey my ideas through the webcomic. The internship portion related to how this webcomic was supposed to be done in conjunction with the mental health peer support nonprofit I was interning for, in which I would publish the comic on the organization’s site so it could be shared widely. Altogether, I wanted this academic internship to be the culmination of my scholar-activist career— something that took critical, liberating academic ideas and put them in practice so they had more societal impact beyond the illustrious ivy tower.
While this all sounds robust in theory, I admit that the biggest challenge of the AI was execution of the webcomic. I had done the research and created the webcomic drafts, but admittedly, I never actually published anything online. In fact, many of the original plans in terms of collaboration with the nonprofit and the initial timeline had to be shifted. Even though this was the case, I still find the entire experience valuable. I may not have come out with a grand end result of a webcomic with however much engagement or publicity, but I did take away a flexible, cross-disciplinary mindset that suitably wrapped up my time at Brown.
Furthermore, from all of this, I started to grasp an important lesson. From my “less-than-picturesque” experience of the AI, I realized that the work, result, and anything in-between of any sort of endeavor will often be messy and unexpected. I learned that this is typical but does not mean any of it is “wrong” or any less valuable.
So for anyone reading or thinking of creating an AI (or anything else with the CRC!), know that yes, making and then executing the AI will most likely be nonlinear and difficult. Yet, I found freedom in venturing into novel niches and that the challenge of doing so helped expand my ideas of what is possible or meaningful. So I hope you are able to move toward the discomfort and uncertainty that may lie in doing something like an AI. And I hope that, if you do, you’ll find some of your own kind of freedom too.