Zaki Djemal '15, Founder and Managing Partner, fresh.fund
Thesis Title: Doing the Right Wrong Thing: Towards a Serviceable Theory of a Participatory Public Good: A Call to Service
“Social Studies presented me with both the motivation and means to rigorously engage with the world not as a passive bystander but as an active, critical and informed participant, and for this, I will remain eternally grateful.”
James Hairston '06, Director of Virtual Reality, Facebook
Thesis Title: Barbershop Barometrics: The Effet of Black Barbershops on Social Connectedness and the Lives of At-Risk Black Men
“I wrote my senior thesis on barbershops and what they can teach us about social capital and the health of communities. A decade later, I still think about the fabric of communities all the time—especially how to build technology that will deepen human connection and understanding.”
Jody Kelman '05, Director, Self-Driving Platform, Lyft
Thesis Title: The Broken Promise: Why Liberal Democracies Shut Their Doors to Asylum Seekers
“The typical questions with which my team and I engage on a daily basis are poorly served by the rigid logic of the engineering degrees more common in my line of work. We must be at once Freudians in our understanding of the human psyche and our comfort with change; economic historians in the vein of Smith or Schumpeter in our attempts to balance the implications of a massive technology shift on society; and Foucaultian observers of the subtle interplay between the design choices we make and the behaviors we produce.”