Daphne Wang went to Tulsa to write code. She is a mechanical engineering undergraduate at MIT, and last summer she took an internship at the Muscogee Creek Nation Department of Health in Oklahoma, the kind of placement that, on paper, suggests screens and terminals and the solving of technical problems. Instead she found herself reading history.

“I learned so much that I think should be required curriculum for every single person in this country,” Wang says. What she means by tech for good, she says now, is “genuinely getting out into communities and learning about people who aren’t you, creating worldly perspectives that you ultimately can take into everything else that you do.”

Wang was one of 10 MIT undergraduates in the 2026 Code.Tulsa program, run by the Institute’s PKG Center for Social Impact and paid for by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The program is in its second year. The students live for the summer at the University of Tulsa and intern with the Muscogee and Cherokee nations and with two local nonprofits, Black Tech Street and the Urban Coders Guild. The work is AI, data science, the usual catalogue. The surroundings are not.

The survey

Wang and her fellow intern Lucy Sun, who majors in artificial intelligence and decision making, spent the summer helping build the Muscogee Nation’s first Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System survey — PRAMS, in the health-department shorthand — to collect maternal health data specific to Muscogee women. They did literature reviews. They worked through data sets. They drafted questions. And they did all of it inside a frame most engineering curricula do not come near: data sovereignty, the governance structures by which a tribal nation decides what is asked, what is kept, and who owns the answers.

“It was this change of pace — 180 [degrees] from MIT, completely,” Wang says. At MIT, instructors prepare students for big technical challenges. What the Institute offers less often, she says, is the chance to “work with communities, [learn] how to think about the cultural and historical dimensions of the work, or how to consider the people who will be affected.”

Her supervisor in Tulsa, the epidemiologist Breanna McNaughton-Long, measures the summer differently. “They were instrumental. They did so much work that I don’t think we would have been able to do as quickly,” she says of Wang and Sun. “And they brought this sense that we were doing something that mattered.”

The humanist lens

The structure around the internships is deliberate. Vippy Yee, the PKG Center’s assistant dean for community-based programs, pairs the professional work with education on the historical and cultural weight of tech development in the Tulsa region, taught from the perspective of local leaders. The framing is the point. “As with all PKG Center programming, our aim is to help students integrate an engineer’s approach to problem-solving with a humanist lens on the nature of social challenges, and by extension interventions,” says Alison Badgett, the center’s director.

Chenise Harper, who studies electrical engineering with computing and interned with the Urban Coders Guild, puts the transaction plainly. “I hated history,” she says, “but I learned a lot about why it is useful for making social change and how to go about researching it. I now feel a lot more confident that I can make an impact.”

The camp

Code.Tulsa began with a student who lived on the other side of the question. Jack Carson, now an MIT sophomore in electrical engineering and computer science, arrived as an incoming first-year with the idea already formed. He is from Tulsa. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation. He had seen that rural Native students, the ones who might benefit most from STEM education, were the least likely to be offered it. His proposal was a weeklong STEM camp at the University of Tulsa for members of federally recognized tribes, with him and the Code.Tulsa interns as instructors.

Carson built a nomination system to find promising high schoolers and chose 25 campers from 10 tribes out of 160 applications representing 25 Native nations. To design the curriculum he recruited Allie Zong, a Harvard student he had met at MIT’s Campus Preview Weekend. The result, the Tulsa Advanced Sciences Camp — TASC — runs intensive tracks in AI engineering, DNA technology, physics, and chemistry and energy, alongside philosophical workshops meant to get students thinking, as the organizers put it, about what they can and should achieve in the near and long term. “We teach them not knowledge, but curiosity, and the skills to teach themselves,” Zong says.

The campers describe the effect in their own terms. Alyssa Theofanidis, a rising high school senior from Houston and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, says TASC “kind of propelled me to self-study calculus”; she attended the first year and came back this summer as a teaching assistant. Another camper said the camp “got us to think 1,000 times more ambitiously about the impact we could have,” citing guest speakers “like the nuclear fusion person at the top of their field” — a reference to the physicist Alexandra LeViness of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinout, who helped build the camp’s chemistry and energy track. “I thought, maybe this is what MIT looks like,” said one camper. Several now intend to apply.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. addressed the campers, pressing them toward what he called a public interest in technology. He noted what he described as a very special relationship between the Cherokee Nation and MIT, and thanked Carson, a former secretary of the Cherokee Nation tribal youth council, for organizing the effort.

What they carried home

The PKG Center’s wager is that most of these students will not take jobs the world files under social impact — and that it does not matter, because the public interest travels with them. Elvis Chipiro, a junior in computer science and engineering who interned with the Cherokee Nation, left Tulsa writing like someone who had been made to think about where systems land. “Social impact is not separate from mainstream technology; rather, it is embedded in the choices engineers make every day,” he reflected. “Ultimately, meaningful social change is not driven by technology alone, but by people willing to design systems with empathy, responsibility, and inclusion at the center.”

For Harper, the summer worked more like a recovery. “Remembering that … I could use my MIT education to help others was a big reason I applied to MIT in the first place,” she says. “But I forgot my own mission in the stress of school. Code.Tulsa really re-opened my eyes to why I am here.”

It is hard to read the students’ accounts without noticing how little the engineers brought and how much they took — that the flow of instruction, in Tulsa, ran mostly one way. The Chief said it in the shape of a warning and an invitation, to a room of teenagers from 10 tribes.

“Technology can be used for good, or it can be used for harm. Your generation has the opportunity to bend that arc toward something good.”