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Senior Ananya Gurumurthy, a three-year recipient of MIT’s Emerson Classical Vocal Scholarship, recalls getting ready to take the stage at Carnegie Hall to sing a Mozart opera she once sang with the New York All-State Choir. The conductor of the choir reminded him about the articulation of the words and the inclusion of the diaphragm.
“If you don’t make your voice heard, how will people hear you when you perform?” Gurumurthy recalls the conductor telling him. “This is your moment, your chance to connect with such a huge audience.”
Gurumurthy illustrates the universal truth of these words as he adds his musical talents to teaching math and computer science to campaign for social and economic justice.
Daughter of immigrants
Growing up in Edgemont, New York, he was inspired to fight on behalf of others by his South Asian immigrant parents who came to the United States in the 1980s. His father is a management consultant, and his mother is an investment banker.
“They came 15 years after the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which removed national origin quotas from America’s immigration system,” he says. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the civil rights movement that preceded both me and my parents.”
His parents told him about the anti-immigrant sentiment of his new home; For example, his father was a graduate student in Dallas leaving a store when he was pelted with glass bottles and racial slurs.
“I often think how brave it was for them to leave everything they knew to immigrate to a new but still imperfect country in search of something better,” he says. “As a result, I’ve always felt so grounded as both a South Asian American and a woman of color. These identities allowed me to think critically about how I can most effectively reform the institutions around me.”
Gurumurthy has been singing since she was 11, but in high school she decided to make her political voice a reality by working with New York Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins. At one point, Gurumurthy noted that a log was kept for constituent call subjects like “affordable housing” and “infrastructure,” and that’s when he learned that Stewart-Cousins was addressing those callers’ most pressing issues. before the Senate.
“This experience was the first time I saw how powerful it was to mobilize large numbers of voters to influence important legislative changes,” says Gurumurthy.
After he began applying his mathematical skills to political campaigns, Gurumurthy was soon hired to run analytics for the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) midterm election initiative. As a lead analyst at the New York DNC, he developed an interactive activation-contest (IAC) model to understand voting patterns in the 2018 and 2020 elections. He collected data from public voting records to predict how voters would vote and used the IAC algorithm to strategize with grassroots organizations and allocate resources to empower historically disenfranchised groups in municipal, state and federal elections to encourage them to vote.
Research and student organizing at MIT
When he came to MIT in 2019 to study math with computer science, music and economics minors, he admits he was troubled by the naïve notion that he was “building digital tools that would single-handedly alleviate collective pressures. Systemic injustice in this country.”
Since then, he’s learned to create what he calls a “more nuanced vision.” He has mastered data analytics skills to build mobilization platforms for organizations pursuing social and economic justice, including working with Fair Fight Action in Fulton, Georgia (through a Kelly-Douglas Foundation Fellowship) to analyze voter suppression patterns and MIT ethics. Computer science and artificial intelligence labs to develop symbolic AI protocols to better understand biases in AI algorithms. For his work at the International Monetary Fund (through the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program), Gurumurthy was awarded runner-up for the 2022 S. Klein Prize in Technical Writing for his paper “The Rapid Rise of Cryptocurrency.”
“The outcome of each project gave me more hope to start the next one because I could see the impact of these digital tools,” he says. “I’ve seen people feel empowered to use their voice, whether it’s voting for the first time, protesting against exploitative global monetary policy, or fighting gender discrimination. I was really lucky to see firsthand the power of mathematical analysis.”
“I realized that the constructive use of technology can be a powerful voice of resistance against injustice,” he says. “Because numbers matter, and when people witness them, they are motivated to take meaningful action.”
Hoping to make a difference in her community, she joined several institute committees. As co-chair of the Undergraduate Association Education Committee, she launched MIT’s first digital petition for classroom transparency and worked with faculty members on institute committees to ensure that all students were provided with adequate resources to participate in online education. The COVID-19 pandemic. The digital petition inspired him to start a project called Insite to develop a more centralized digital means of collecting data about student life at MIT to better understand the policies of its governing bodies. As chairman of the ring committee, he ensured that the special traditions of the “Brass Rat” were made economically available to all members of the class, helping the committee to nearly triple the financial aid budget. For his efforts at MIT, he received the William L. Stewart Jr. Award “[her] Contributions [as] An individual student at MIT on extracurricular activities and student life.”
Ananya plans to attend law school after graduation, studying constitutional law to use her technical expertise to build quantitative evidence for cases involving voting rights, social welfare, and ethical technology, and set legal standards for “human use. data,” he says.
“By creating digital tools for various social and economic justice organizations, I hope we can challenge our existing systems of power and realize the progress we so desperately need to see.” There is strength in numbers, both algorithmically and organizationally. I believe it is our responsibility to simultaneously use these strengths to change the world. “
However, her ambitions began when she began taking singing lessons at the age of 11; Without her as a vocalist, she says she would be vocal.
“The opera performance gave me the opportunity to really get into my character and convey strong emotions in my performance. In the process, I’ve learned that my voice is most powerful when it reflects my true beliefs, whether I’m performing or speaking publicly. I truly believe that this honesty has allowed me to become an effective community organizer. I want to believe that this voice is what makes people around me act.”
Private music study is available to students through the Emerson/Harris program, which offers merit-based financial awards to students who have made outstanding achievements on their instruments or in voice in classical, jazz, or world music. The Emerson/Harris program is sponsored by the late Cherry L. Emerson Jr. SM ’41, Associate Provost Ellen T. In response to an address by Harris (Class of 1949 Emeritus Professor of Music).
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