On the weekend of Feb. 26, the African American Student Union (AASU) successfully capped off Black History Month by hosting its 17th annual Black Leadership Conference.

“Since 2004, the Black Leadership Conference has been AASU’s premier leadership event created for and by Black students, providing hundreds of young Black leaders a forum where they can hone their leadership skills to become changemakers on campus and in their communities,” Kyle Smith, Chair of the Black Leadership Conference, wrote in his conference welcome letter. “In the past, our conferences have featured renowned keynote speakers, workshops for achieving success in academia and industry, and equipped students with the tools and networking opportunities needed to foster their personal and professional growth.”

The purpose of the conference is to engage Black students and alumni, providing them with both inspiration and essential expertise to take on leadership positions at Tech and beyond.

For the first time ever, the conference took place virtually throughout the weekend.

It featured several speakers, workshops on many topics and panels intended to boost and support leadership abilities within its attendees.

This year’s conference theme was “Black Brilliance: Passion. Purpose. Intentionality,” with a vision “to empower young Black leaders to use their talents, gifts, and brilliance to uplift the Black community and advance the cause of justice in their personal and professional lives.”

The primary goal is not for Black students to gain the skills they need to succeed, it is instead for them to realize that the tools they need to thrive already lie within them.

The AASU, along with the Black Alumni Organization (BAO), Society of Black Engineers (SBE) and Office of Minority Educational Development (OMED), hosted a lineup of five speakers, including Nsé Ufot, a Tech alumnus and CEO of the New Georgia Project; Andre Dickens, a Tech alumnus and City of Atlanta council member; Kaye Husbands Fealing, Dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts; and Jeanne Kerney, a Tech alumnus and president of BAO.

Workshop topics included activism, finance, health and career-hunting — a variety of skill-sets students can use as they pursue leadership positions and lifestyles.

Part of the AASU mission is to make these opportunities accessible to Black students who may not receive the same opportunities as their white and other people of color (POC) counterparts, especially at a predominately non-Black institution such as Tech

Founded in 1968, on the same day of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, AASU was founded to increase Black enrollment and retention at the Institute and has since given Black students a social outlet and a means for advocacy during and after their time at Tech.

Although their specific missions have shifted over time, five key responsibilities of the organization remain the same.

The AASU website lists these as: “to provide a voice for Black students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, to promote social and cultural awareness in the Georgia Tech community, to improve and maintain relationships between African-American students and students of other ethnic backgrounds, to provide a social and cultural outlet for its members, and to take an active part in the activities of the Institute.”

Part of this mission involves fostering academic and professional growth for Black students at Tech, which is one the objectives of each recurring Black Leadership Conference. However, the final intention and execution varies from year to year.

This year’s Black Leadership Conference looks especially different from previous years’ for a variety of reasons beyond just taking place virtually.

“The Black Lives Matter movement, Covid-19 pandemic, and historic levels of Black voter turnout in Georgia’s most recent elections make it clear that our country is at a critical inflection point,” Smith wrote. “The Young people have a crucial role to play as our nation charts a path forward and our energy, activism, and leadership has and will continue to make our society more just.

“We hope our conference will serve as a catalyst that will inspire you to use your gifts to uplift our community.”

Since last February’s Black Leadership Conference, Tech, Atlanta and the rest of the world have endured historic political and social changes, particularly those surrounding the Black community, making this year’s conference more essential than ever before.

To find out more information about AASU and membership, visit gtaasu.org.

From rhythm and blues to musical theatre, writer and performer Nick Blaemire truly is a musical jack of all trades. But in his latest album, “Superstitious Drive,” Blaemire wanted to try something new.

“I wrote a lot of the songs on ‘Superstitious Drive’ within the year of recording it, and some of the verses I wrote while I was singing, like it’s a lot of improv … that got me to a more vulnerable place,” Blaemire said. “I was frustrated by trying to make a living making music, when it’s a very personal act.”

Blaemire is best known as a writer for his 2008 Broadway musical “Glory Days,” but has since participated in the pop/rhythm and blues group, Nick Blaemire and The Hustle, released his first EP, Ampersand and performed in productions on Broadway and beyond. Most recently he experienced a personal crisis as the Covid-19 pandemic tore him away from the stages on which he had been entertaining audiences.

In short, Blaemire has had a busy decade.

Now, not only is he using his past experiences to inspire his latest work; he is also trying to break away from the career he has had in order to explore something more authentic.

“Musicals … are extensively about something else, even if you’re writing about your own experience,” he said, “The pandemic just has given this opportunity to really speak to something specific and discover how I felt about it through the writing, as opposed to just writing another song about time has already gone by, or an experience that somebody else had.”

Beyond his work in the world of theater, Blaemire’s music still tells a story.

“‘The Hustle’ was very much about hustling and being in New York and trying to get my music out there and trying to bottle the rhythm of New York City in that record,” he said “‘Ampersand’ was more about collaboration and this idea of ‘I don’t want to do this alone,’ and I love the process of giving my ideas to somebody else who’s talented and seeing how they can respond to it and make it better or different.”

“Superstitious Drive” was also a direct response to the events happening around Blaemire.

“This record was entirely about this pandemic and the political administration that we have just lived through and the hopes for a brighter future and the acknowledgement of the sort of frustrating contradictions inside every human being,” he said.

Although “Superstitious Drive” is a deeply personal album, Blaemire was not the only contributor making it happen.

“My collaborator is a genius person named Van Hughes. Van, like the mode of transportation, which he absolutely is,” Blaemire said. “He definitely takes me from the place that I’m in to places I never knew existed. And as a collaborator, there’s kind of no more you can dream of.”

Earlier last year, Blaemire and Hughes experimented with writing and producing sounds from Hughes’s computer, and a collection of songs emerged. The two decided to move forward with the music and attempt to produce a record.

“When art tells you what it is, you kind of have to listen to it,” Blaemire said. “As an overthinking person, that’s hard.”

During a year of uncertainty and hardships, Blaemire found balance in creating.

“Writing has always been this thing where I can put my nervous energy somewhere, and where I can log my experience in a language that I find really inspiring, through music or through stories,” he said. “Once the pandemic became reality and not just like this anomaly moment, I was like, ‘I have one life and I would like to continue to live it the way that I was living.’ I liked getting up every day and writing. And even though suddenly I wasn’t sure what it was for anymore, I just felt like I should.”

Throughout last year, Blaemire wrote not only “Superstitious Drive,” but also two movies, a television pilot and three different stage shows that are still in progress.

But while the pandemic has certainly affected the volume of his output, Blaemire does not attribute the outpouring of writing simply to more free time.

“Just surviving is an accomplishment and making your time meaningful feels like the goal now more than ever,” he said. “That’s helped my art. It hasn’t changed in terms of the rate that I’m working, but I think my work has gotten deeper and clearer, because I’ve had the time and because this pandemic has reshaped the way that I think about life.”

A strong motif within Blaemire’s latest album is the theme of travel, either direct travel from one place to another or in a larger sense of aging and moving through space.

“Physically, I’ve been trying to get out and about as much as I possibly can during this time [when] there’s so much stillness,” Blaemire said.

“I especially love driving. I find it to be an incredible act, and very metaphorical for what it feels like to be a person. … You could die at any moment, so stay on the road, stay focused and there’s something like the car is driving itself at certain times. I think that’s a metaphor for the artistic process — you have to let the car drive. Let the album tell you what it is, let the music guide you.”

Nick Blaemire’s album “Superstitious Drive” is out now on all music platforms.

Mentor Jackets has been going strong through the Student Alumni Association (SAA) for some time now, but Jeanne Kerney, CE ‘84 and president of the Black Alumni Organization (BAO) noticed a key problem. Black students were not nearly as involved with the program as their peers.

Since Tech was desegregated in 1961, Black students have continuously been overlooked by administration. When Kerney attended in the early 1980’s, there were only two Black professors within the entire Institute.

Society has come a long way since then, but still, only 2.8% of professors are Black as of 2018. When almost two-thirds of professors are white, Black students are forced to look elsewhere for role models of color, especially considering how white-dominated engineering and other STEM fields have been.

“Particularly in the Black community, there’s just a lack of understanding that you need help and that people are there that can help you that have gone ahead of you,” Kerney said.

That’s where Black Mentor Jackets comes in.

SAA and BAO have partnered to create a mentor program for Black students that will reveal opportunities beyond Tech as well as keep students involved post graduation.

“I know, in my own experience, that it helps to talk to someone who’s walked down the path that you’ve walked before,” Kerney said. “You know, we always say you always hear experience is the best teacher, but if someone else has the experience, why don’t you just go ahead and get that information from them?”

Her own daughter graduated from Tech in 2017 and Kerney noticed that her daughter’s friends were constantly reaching out with questions.

She knew that herself and her peers had a wealth of knowledge to share with their younger counterparts.

It was simply a matter of how to best communicate it.

Kerney also wanted Black students to have mentors that could guide them through their time at Tech and beyond, as well as mentors that could make students feel comfortable.

“They feel more comfortable with a mentor that looks like them,” Kerney said. “Most of the students come from a background where the only people they see are people that look like them.”

This idea extends beyond the Black mentor program.

“We need more professors who look like the students, which is not just we need more Black professors,” Kerney said. “We need more Black professors,” Kerney said. “We need more Latinx professors, we need more Pan-Asian professors.”

During her own time at the Institute, Kerney attended on an Reserve Officers’ Training Corps [ROTC] scholarship and found her own role models through the ROTC program, as well as her sorority and the fraternity through which she was a little sister.

Still, she would have been greatly assisted by a program like Black Mentor Jackets if it had existed during her college years.

“It would have been helpful to have someone to always be able to talk to, someone who had already graduated,” Kerney said. “I had a lot of informal upperclassmen mentors, but to have to talk to someone who had already graduated would have been huge.”

Kerney’s biggest asset gained from Tech was the confidence, competence and resilience she needed to begin her career knowing she was capable of greatness.

Now, decades out of college, she is still learning from the mentees she has served as mentor to. Kerney struggles to stay relevant and relatable. She has a hard time communicating the things she would have wanted her 21-year-old self to have known without sounding like a lecturing mother.

“[My role is] encouraging her to make her own decisions, not being dependent on somebody else to make decisions for her,” Kerney said.

Long after the time when she would have had a mentor at Tech, Kerney is inspired by the change she’s seen since her graduation.

While there is still much more work to be done, there have been five Black deans in Georgia Tech history, more than the amount of Black professors in Kerney’s time.

“[Seeing an increase in Black faculty at Tech] feels good,” she said. “Those give me a lot of hope.”

The road forward, however, doesn’t stop there. Kerney would like to see a further inclusion of Black history in school curriculum.

“I look forward to the white professors and the white students really beginning to study and recognize left out parts of the history of the United States and develop true knowledge and empathy of what people that don’t look like them have experienced in the U.S.,” Kerney said.

Further, Kerney is interested in further integration of students of different races and from different backgrounds.

“Segregation is not legal in the United States anymore, but we still live segregated lives,” Kerney said “At Tech, one thing that I know from talking to the students is that the students generally just don’t feel welcome.”

Her advice is for students to reach out to their peers of differing races and ethnicities.

“Just look at your inner circle and say, ‘Can I reach out and find someone that doesn’t look like me, get to know someone who doesn’t look like me, maybe start to study with someone who doesn’t look like me?,’” Kerney said.

Although Black Mentor Jackets is a crucial program for Black students, Kerney also wants to focus on forming mentorships beyond race and gender barriers.

“If you are Black, you have to get a white mentor, and if you are white, you have to get a Black mentor, and there’s an opportunity to do all of that,” Kerney said. “Learn to start to interact with someone that doesn’t look like you.”

The best way to start this process and create a welcoming environment is to inform oneself about the history that has brought the country and its society to where it is today.

Kerney advises non-Black students to pick a book or podcast and use it to educate themselves not just this month during Black History Month, but every single month.

To learn more, visit gtbao.gtalumni.org.

As the spring semester gets underway, so has recruitment for many of Tech’s student organizations.

This includes Ramblin’ Reck Club, Student Center Programs Council (SCPC), Greek Life and SMILE. Ramblin’ Reck Club is one of Tech’s oldest and most revered clubs on campus.

Its founding reflects its mission.

“We were founded in 1930, so as you can imagine, the entire world was pretty sad at the time,” said Whitney Miller, fifth-year ECON major and the 2021 Reck Club Membership Chair. “The head football coach at the time looked for a group of enthusiastic students to bring the campus morale up, which is why we say we’ve been spreading joy since 1930. That’s, at our core, what we wanted to do.”

The centerpiece of the club and one of many symbols of Tech, the Ramblin’ Wreck, is one of an abundance of opportunities the club has to bring spirit to campus.

The club hosts student experiences, plans Homecoming, attends sporting events and is active in a multitude of other ways to bring smiles to the faces of otherwise stressed students.

Because Ramblin’ Reck Club has such a crucial duty on campus, their recruitment and selection process is intensive and selective.

“Because we are such a small and intimate club, it’d be a little weird to just have an application and pick people,” Miller said. “We are looking for such a weird niche of enthusiastic Tech students, our process looks for a person and not just what they are on paper.”

Once a prospective member fills out their application, a series of socials and interviews take place to get to know the applicant. The club has an extremely holistic review process, but the general trait the organization is seeking is genuine passion for Tech.

“A common misconception is that you have to be an expert on traditions, history and Reck Club to apply for Reck Club, and that’s not necessarily true,” Miller said. “We’re more about enthusiasm and how excited you are to learn more than what you already know coming into the process.”

The application can be accessed at reckclub.org and is due by midnight on Friday, Jan. 29. Applicants with any questions can contact Miller at membershipchair@reckclub.org.

Another organization on campus responsible for shaping campus life is SCPC, who plans a variety of different events around campus and Atlanta, including Midnight Breakfast and Ramble In. While the application deadline for SCPC has already passed, recruitment usually occurs at the beginning of each semester.

The deadline has also passed for the Interfraternity Council (IFC) rush week, but the Continuous Open Bidding (COB) process is still open for the Collegiate Panhellenic Council (CPC), which will accept new sorority recruits on a rolling basis throughout the semester.

Unlike previous Spring semesters, all eight CPC chapters, as well as two associate chapters are recruiting for membership.

The interest form for COB can be found at gatechcpc.com.

SMILE, a relatively new student organization, is responsible for uplifting the mood around campus through love notes, painted pumpkins, goodie bags and staff appreciation.

Their application is also rolling and can be accessed via their Facebook or Instagram, @SMILE.gatech.

With the long list of student organizations, only a fraction of whom even have a recruitment or application process, every student at Tech is guaranteed to find their place and people on campus.

Recruitment for the fall will also be quickly approaching, so students can keep an eye out for organizations they are interested in joining.

Our Take: 4/5 Stars

Less than six months following the release of the smash hit “folklore,” Taylor Swift made yet another surprise release on Dec. 11 with an encore album featuring her new folk acoustic sound. “evermore,” Swift’s ninth record, is dubbed the sister-record to its predecessor — that much is clear.

A sequel album is always appreciated, but Swift fans can not help but wonder where the twist is. “evermore,” while still the final saving grace of 2020, sounds like it consists of the leftover songs from “folklore.” The material is not stale yet, but is dangerously close to being labelled as such.

The record kicks off with the lead single, “willow,” another brokenhearted anthem of a past love. While “willow” is simultaneously the perfect song to both dance and cry to, it is a familiar echo of more than a few songs from “folklore.”

Swift has honed in on the themes and styles her fan base enjoys most, but is quickly exhausting her inspiration material for folk-pop heartache.

A surprise title, “‘tis the damn season,” marks the first time Swift, once the young and innocent girl-next-door, has used a curse word in a song title.

The name and cold weather themes of the song hint at a Christmas melody, especially considering the month during which Swift released the album. The lyrics, however, contain nothing related to the winter holidays; rather, “tis the damn season” is a nostalgic ode to a fleeting, long-distance relationship.

But perhaps the biggest shock of evermore is the angry revenge ballad, “no body, no crime,” featuring HAIM, a pop rock band consisting of a trio of sisters, the eldest of whom shares a name with the main character of the song, Este.

This mysterious woman has an unfaithful husband, who is suspected of teaming up with his mistress to kill his wife to be. While the song’s narrator, friend to Este, does not openly admit to the murder of the deceitful spouse, she wickedly hints at her plan to kill him and frame his mistress.

This song in particular shows how Swift has defied the sweetheart-of-country-music label given to her at 16 and recreated herself as a woman of all genres.

However, Swift has failed to let go of the romantic themes that were the focus of her teenage career.

Each song from “evermore” is a lament to another failed relationship. It is hard to tire of Swift’s independent, needs-no-man personality, especially following a decade’s worth of love — and breakup — songs. But one is left to ask when she plans to come up with any new material, especially given that this album is a carbon copy of the last.

Following the evolution of Swift’s music from one phase to the next, fans know she can be depended upon for new material.

The question, though, is how soon the next genre adventure can begin.

There are a variety of skills to be learned at Tech, from computer science to communication to efficiently navigating East Campus while avoiding Freshman Hill.

Among the lesser known lessons to be learned as a Jacket is ballroom dance.

Ballroom Dance Club is a student-led sports club. In this club, students can practice and compete in ballroom dance.

The club hosts a variety of different events throughout each semester, including socials, weekly lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and competition trips.

“Our big events are our three socials,” Erin Wrobel, third-year MATH, said.

“We usually have about one per month, and those consist of intro lessons and social dancing.”

“The first one is free and after that, it’s about five dollars for students.”

Wrobel serves as the competitive coordinator of Ballroom Dance Club, which among other things, puts her in charge of organizing competitive trips as well as the annual ballroom dance competition hosted by the club.

“We host our own competition every February,” Wrobel said. “We also go on about three or four competition trips to other schools or other states per semester.”

Competitions, however, are only a small part of what the club does.

“We have choreography lessons, which are based on beginning-of-the-semester tryouts and usually happen in partnership, so you will have a designated dance partner if you’re on the competition team, and you learn the choreographies with them,” Wrobel said.

“Once you get out of choreography lessons, you get to go to off-campus professional technique lessons.”

There are also open practices on Wednesday and Saturday nights, to which anyone can come.

The club plays music, and everyone does their own dance practices.

This semester, however, the club is looking different.

As a sport involving two people dancing in close proximity, it’s hard to navigate what Ballroom Dance Club looks like in these times.

“We’re still having social lessons,” Wrobel said.

“We’ve recently been able to connect those much more in person, because we got approval from sport clubs.

“Currently those are happening in person, just distanced away from each other.”

“We have people standing six feet apart acting like they’re dancing with each other while not actually touching.”

The other lessons have taken different forms to be the most useful while still as safe as possible.

“A lot of the lessons are still happening, just with more distancing protocols in place,” Wrobel said.

“At first we were doing virtual lessons, and most of our lessons are still virtually available.”

“We had a competitive practice Friday night, and we have transformed that into more of a drills class, and our Wednesday night open practice has turned into a student-led technique class, because that would be more useful than just having an open practice where nobody’s allowed to dance with each other.”

While in-person competitions are not taking place, the club is still able to record videos of solo events and send them to competitions.

Wrobel says her favorite aspect of the club is by far the people, and this has not changed with the new safety and distancing protocols implemented by the club.

“My best friends in college have come from ballroom dance,” she said.

“It’s obviously more sad this semester, because I’m not allowed to dance with people, but to the extent that I’m allowed to interact with them, they’re literally my favorite people, and it’s just a really fun and supportive community.”

A unique aspect of the club is that no dance experience is required.

Wrobel herself had very little dance experience going in and learned all of her ballroom dance skills during her time with her club.

“You can take beginner lessons as many times as you would like until you feel comfortable with it, but also our beginner lessons are really well taught and we have plenty of opportunities for you to practice the skills,” she said.

Even if you have no dance experience whatsoever, it’s really easy to still be able to make progress, and no matter what you come to, you’ll still be able to dance something by the time you leave.”

But the education that participants receive goes beyond learning not to step on toes.

“There’s lots of different life skills that are built in it, like being able to interact with other people and consideration for what your partner is doing or comfortable with and relationship building skills,” Wrobel said.

“If you’re in a dance partnership, even if it’s not a romantic relationship, it’s still another human in your life, whose actions are highly intertwined with yours.”

“That’s a really positive skill to be able to build, as well as building adulting skills in general,” Wrobel concluded.

During this time it is important to take breaks from everyday stressors and pursue outlets for creativity and connection.

Ballroom dance club provides such an outlet for all students, no matter their experience or skill level.

The club is a great way to feel less isolated on campus during the pandemic.

Students seeking to get involved with Ballroom Dance Club can sign up for events at mycrc.gatech.edu and gatech.campuslabs.com.

Students must register with mycrc.gatech.edu to get into the CRC.

Students can also check out the ballroom dance website at ballroomdance.gtorg.gatech.edu or reach out to gtballroomdance@gmail.com for more information.

Over the past month and a half, Tech has seen a rapid uptick in cases of bicycle thefts on campus.

While there is no real indication as to why this is happening right now, a prominent underlying cause of bike thefts is simply opportunity.

Many Tech students, faculty and staff use bicycles and other two-wheeled vehicles, such as mopeds and scooters, to transport themselves around campus, making the school prone to targeting for bike theft.

“All we can say is that it’s a crime of convenience,” Chris Huggins, a criminal investigator with the Georgia Tech Police Department (GTPD), said. “[Bike thiefs] are always looking for the easiest target. … The biggest common denominator is that people are using poor devices to secure their property. They’re using cable locks, which is basically a cable wire which runs through [the bicycle]. Those are very easy to cut. Most bike perpetrators carry the common bolt cutters, where it’s very easy to cut it, and they’re gone.”

The perpetrators of the crime are predominantly not students, and GTPD has seen a handful of thieves come back to steal multiple bikes.

The cases started to rise in mid-September in East Campus housing and has since migrated to West Campus housing. An incident even occurred in family housing off of North Campus.

GTPD heavily encourages students to practice bike safety and secure their vehicles through social media and other initiatives.

The biggest factor in keeping one’s bike safe is to secure it with a bump lock rather than a cable lock. Cyclists should also use an extra chain lock to secure their back wheel, as some thieves will take just a wheel instead of the whole frame.

Vehicles should also be locked to a bike rack near a building, rather than to a pole or other location, which tend to be less secure.

Prior to an incident, everyone who uses a bicycle on campus can register their bikes and scooters at police.gatech.edu/registration.

“[This way,] if their bike were to come up missing and it were to wind up at a local pawn shop, we have a way to tie it back to the original owner,” said Robert Rodrigeuz, GTPD crime prevention officer.

“If we find a bicycle somewhere on campus, it makes [the victim’s] life easier, because we don’t have to find out who the bike belongs to, and we don’t have to wait for a victim [to report the incident], because they might not ride their bike that often, and they may not realize for four months that their bicycle was stolen.”

Rodriguez has been creating graphics for social media and pamphlets to pass out around campus with theft prevention tips for cyclists.

“Our other units go out and make sure when they’re patrolling to check those areas and if they see a bike that’s not locked up, we have these locks that will lock it up that have our number on it,” said Benjamin Taylor, GTPD’s social media coordinator.

“If it’s someone’s bike that needs it and it has our lock on it, they can call us to come unlock it so they can go, and that way, it doesn’t get stolen if it’s left unsecured.”

Since mid-October, the cases have been declining, in part due to the safety information initiatives, but also due to active investigations.

“In terms of scooters, we were successful in arresting two perpetrators and recovering two scooters by aggressively investigating,” Huggins said.

“When we get those results, that spreads around in the community too, as far as their willingness to come back, because they understand that we are taking this seriously. Things have definitely toned down in the last couple of weeks.”

In every situation, the victims could have easily prevented the situation entirely by taking an extra several minutes to lock up their vehicle, even if that meant that they would have been a few minutes late to class.

“With the people that I’ve dealt with that have had stuff stolen, they don’t realize how much of an inconvenience it is until they get stuff stolen,” Taylor said.

Students can learn more about bike and campus safety by following @GaTechPD on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Students can also reach out to GTPD at any time with new proposals on security initiatives.

“We’re always trying to build new relations, so if there’s someone we aren’t currently partnering with, we’re open to that,” Rodriguez said.

“We’d love to sit down with current organizations and figure out how we can help each other become a stronger and safer community.”

In the last decade, the LGBTQ+ community has seen a rise in representation in the media, particularly of gay and lesbian characters. While many acknowledge this as generally beneficial, it is still crucial to recognize that these portrayals are frequently based on – often negative – stereotypes.

Additionally, other under-acknowledged gender and sexual identities, such as asexuality, pansexuality, and nonbinary, are still not represented on screen as often as their other LGBTQ+ counterparts. And above all, audiences can’t trust these depictions as representative of all identities and personal histories within the label.

So where can prospective allies turn to learn more about identities, terminology, and how best to support their LGBTQ+ peers?

Since 2001, Tech has hosted the Safe Space ally training program to further educate those who wish to engage with the LGBTQ+ community in a positive and ethical way.

“The goal of it is to educate and teach the rest of campus about the terminology to use, how to be an ally, better practices that you can employ if you’re a peer or a faculty and staff to create safer, more accessible environments for queer and trans folks,” Tegra Myanna, the director of Tech’s LGBTQIA Resource Center, said. “It’s an education program, so that as you’re a queer or trans student or faculty and staff member navigating campus, people are using your correct name more regularly and not making assumptions about who you are or who you may love.”

The program is open to all Tech employees, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows; often, even those who identify as LGBTQ+ can still be knowledgeable about others who share the same label or identify under a different label.

For undergraduate students who are also interested in getting involved with practicing LGBTQ+ allyship, the Resource Center also offers a similar program, Safe Space: Peer Education, which is facilitated by and for students, so that students may feel more comfortable learning and asking questions.

The content that is covered is uniform for either program, so undergraduate students and employees are learning the same information.

“We go over terminology, so just explaining all the letters in LGBTQIA,” Camilla Brewer, coordinator of the LGBTQIA Resource Center, said. “We also go over steps to being an ally, and we use an academic model of how to build allyship. We also talk about some policies that affect LGBTQIA+ folks at Tech, do some myth busting there, [and] just make the campus more aware of inclusive policies on campus.”

Both Myanna and Brewer have gone through the Safe Space program at their respective undergraduate universities, but had exceedingly dissimilar experiences. Myanna attended the program as an ally, as they were unaware of their identity as LGBTQ+ in college.

“I grew up in rural Nebraska without a strong connection or community of LGBT folks,” they said. “For me, it just helped me be more knowledgeable about the community in general as someone who didn’t really know anything.”

Brewer, who has been openly LGBTQ+ for much longer and therefore did not attend as an ally, still had so much learning to do that she didn’t know she needed.

“I was not very knowledgeable about trans communities or trans issues, so when I attended, I was like, ‘Yes, I might have my personal experience, but then there’s so many other people that exist under this wonderful umbrella,’” she said. “It was still a point of learning. There were also trans folks in my fraternity, so [there was a question of] how I could be an ally to them.”

The intersectional nature of the program is crucial, as it highlights that gender and sexuality, despite sometimes both falling under LGBTQ+, are vastly different things. Further, the stories of two people under the same label are almost always two diverging experiences.

“For some people, [gender and sexuality] might be the same thing, like I can say that I’m queer, and that encompasses everything about my gender and sexuality, but I think for many folks, they’re separate but connected,” Myanna said. “You might be really understanding and knowledgeable about what it means to be gay and lesbian, but have no knowledge about what it means to be a trans woman who is also a lesbian. Those experiences are the same label-wise, like both women and both lesbians, but the experience to that label is so vastly different. I think the training helps to highlight that a little bit.”

The ultimate goal of Safe Space is to educate participants on the complex nature of gender and sexuality, the former often being confused with sex and gender expression.

Tech is well-known for engineering innovative solutions in science and technology, but often, the most overlooked problems Tech students and faculty are working to solve lie outside of the world of STEM.

The sciences remain crucial to modern development; consider for example, the key significance of health and disease sciences this year. However, other principal concerns of 2020 belong to the topics of equity and inclusivity. These issues prompted the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and the College of Computing to team up and launch the Ethics, Technology, and Human Interaction Center (ETHICx).

ETHICx has been in development for three years with the help of funding from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research. It will officially launch with a forum during Ethics Awareness Week in November. The center plans to leverage the event to pinpoint crucial obstacles in technology ethics. Details are to be announced by the center soon.

Technology continues to rapidly advance in the 21st century, in part due to the work of the Tech community. With the advances come questions of what is ethical, responsible research and experimentation. The new Center will venture to expand upon ethics in technology at Tech through education, involvement and research.

The key goal of the Center is to expand upon the studies of ethics, responsible research and the development of scientific industries at Tech. As new technology emerges, ETHICx seeks to foster an environment to aid in this advancement for the betterment of humanity. Several ethical concerns the center seeks to address within this field are accountability, equity, social justice and transparency.

“In the School of Interactive Computing, we encourage all of our faculty and student researchers to think critically about the new challenges their research presents and offer strategies to mitigate any potential negative impact on society,” Ayanna Howard, chair in the School of Interactive Computing, said in an interview published by Tech.

“Good innovation isn’t just about developing new technologies; it’s about developing solutions to problems that can make the world a better, more equitable, and more inclusive place.”

Howard, along with Kaye Husbands Fealing, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, serve as co-directors of ETHICx.

“ETHICx will be a place for robust, multidisciplinary research and a place to engage in systematic ethical analyses,” Husbands Fealing said.

“It also will be a place for communities, corporations, governments, technologists, educators, and others to discuss and find solutions to complex ethical issues in science and technology.”

While computer science and liberal arts may not appear to have a lot in common, both are rooted in responsible and interdisciplinary communication. In fact, the two came together in 2004 at Tech to create the Computational Media degree, a unique meld of computing and the Ivan Allen B.S. degree Literature, Media and Communication.

“There are a lot of different threads that you can take in Computational Media that tie together the humanities and computer science, like People and Film and Media Studies, where you can learn about culture and the arts and how they interact with computer science,” Hannah Wysocki, first year CM, said.

This union stems from the belief that the humanities are essential to creating a more inclusive environment in research and technology and to pushing society as a whole to explore the answers of yet unasked questions. Computer science and technology are a lot about innovation and creating new ways to solve problems, and humanities and the arts involve creativity. Through combining the two, research can introduce innovative, creative solutions.

This concept is not just limited to the College of Computing and the Ivan Allen College; it encompasses the goals of every college here at Tech as well as the Institute as a whole. The intent of the Tech community is to improve the human condition, through science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and, yes, ethics too.

While it may be difficult for many to draw connections between the worlds of science and theatre, playwright Itamar Moses (“The Four of Us: A Play”) brings the two fields together in his play “Completeness” with stunning relevance.

The show is a delightful layering of technical concepts and human emotions providing points of interest for left and right brainers.

“Completeness,” first performed in 2011, has been brought to the currently virtual stages of Horizon Theatre for a short period of time through the Horizon at Home virtual play series.

Lisa Adler, the producing director at Horizon Theatre, argues that science and theatre, two subjects typically seen as polar opposites, have more in common that one would expect.

“They’re both creative fields,” Adler said. “They’re all about your personal creativity, whether it’s exploring human emotions or exploring [something else]. They’re different parts of your brain, but they’re still about creating, exploring, delving, creative problem solving.”

Adler has been trying throughout her time with Horizon Theatre to bring these types of shows to the theater in a way that will engage audiences throughout Atlanta.

“We do a lot of [science-related plays],” she said. “They are not big sellers usually, but I still love them. This play and others that [Moses has] produced would not necessarily be something that we could produce on our mainstage, but we can produce it in a Zoom reading.”

While most of Horizon’s shows have been performed live on Zoom, “Completeness” was pre-recorded with a live audience and a talkback with scientists from Atlanta’s STEM community.

“This play was our first Zoom reading play,” Adler said. “We were filming it right before all of the Black Lives Matter [protests] in Atlanta, and we decided not to release it, because the subject was not [related to more relevant issues]. We filmed it in Zoom, we edited it, and we decided to release it later when that was more appropriate.”

Horizon at Home has been a collection of these Zoom readings, primarily also shows that would be avoided for mainstage performances, with the key intention of bringing a live theatre experience back to quarantined audiences.

“People want to be connected to others. I think that right now, it’s very challenging, because very few people can produce,” Adler said. “People want to sit next to each other and feel the vibe of the actors onstage, although you can’t replace the liveness of knowing that it’s happening right there right now.”

Adler has tried to bring back this live element by producing shows in a regular Zoom meeting format, rather than a Webinar, so that audience members can see each other on the screen along with the actors. However, she knows that despite her best efforts, the play is still experienced from a computer screen.

“It can’t be the same,” Adler said. “Our value is in being live, so we all hope to get back to it. That doesn’t mean there might not be a form of this [that will engage audiences]. I think people that have come to [our events] have been grateful to be still connecting with [something] that’s more like theatre than film and television, and they’re grateful to be able to see actors in our community working too.”

While the live run of “Completeness” has come to an end, it is still available to watch on-demand until Oct. 12th. Horizon also has plans for an upcoming Halloween performance, as well as winter holiday-themed productions for December.

Audiences can watch the show, learn more about Horizon’s upcoming digital season, and donate to the theatre company on their website, horizontheatre.com.

While Horizon, like most theatres around Atlanta, has been struggling during the pandemic, they are still determined to spread the joy of live performance to audiences around the country during a time when they need it more than ever.