MIT News
Q: What is your favorite area of mechanical engineering?
AND: My particular area of interest is robotics. I would be cheerful to work on software-controlled hardware that does cold and fascinating things. Gentle robotics would be an fascinating path forward, but I am not yet committed to any particular field. One particularly fascinating project I worked on involved a swimming robot that used electromagnetic control combined with pliable robotics to mimic the swimming of a fish.
I think that while the pliable robotics part was incredibly creative and fascinating, I was more excited about mimicking nature with robotics. Robots like the MIT Cheetah and the robots at Boston Dynamics are what excite me the most right now. It’s the intersection of not only mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, but also biology. I often find that the more disciplines a project intersects, the more invigorating it is.
Q: Tell us about the communities on campus.
AND: My main one is Chocolate City at MIT. We’re able to create a community that allows a lot of people to feel comfortable at MIT. It’s about 30 people, so you can form close friendships and connections, which can sometimes be really strenuous. And we really motivate people to get involved in the community and be dynamic.
Another gigantic one is my dance company, Sakata Afrique. Dance is something I didn’t think I would get into, but I ended up here and I really enjoyed it. And now it’s a gigantic part of my life. It’s really critical for that reason, but also because the Afro-Caribbean dance company allows me to kind of show and showcase my culture.
I’m a member of the Rho Nu Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Incorporated. It’s the first intercollegiate Greek letter fraternity for black men, and the chapter serves multiple campuses, so it’s allowed me to connect with a lot of different people outside of MIT, which is great. And it’s allowed me to grow as a man and learn a lot of different things.
Q: What are your favorite memories from your time spent in these groups?
AND: One of my fondest memories of Chocolate City is the first event we did in February 2021. When we came back to campus, a lot of people didn’t really know who we were and we had to re-establish the group. The day of the event, we knew we had sold 500 tickets, but seeing all those people, I was like, “Wow, we actually did this.” That was a huge highlight for me because it was my first time being responsible for marketing such a gigantic event.
For Sakata, the highlight was last year when we had our Afro Shake show. Just before we went on stage to dance, there was a rush of emotion because it was something that my co-choreographer and I had been working on all year. And it was the culmination of all our work.
My fraternity had a poetry event last February. Seeing everyone enjoy the event and learn something recent made me feel really good because it was my lineage brother and I’s first program, so it was a gigantic thing that we put a lot of work into and to see it pay off was really amazing.
Q: How did you manage to combine everything with your studies?
AND: Time management is incredibly critical. The busier I got, the crazier my calendar got. I had times when I would plan when I was eating lunch. If I only had an hour to do a task, I had to apply that hour. It was definitely very hard, but I think it’s a great teaching tool. You have a lot more time than you think. You just waste a lot of it. There are many ways to be very strategic about [optimize] Your time.
Q: What do you do in your free time?
AND: Dancing is critical. Exercise, if I have time. I’m interested in music. I’m a part-time musician, actually. I play guitar a lot, because it’s a really good outlet, [and] especially good for expanding my musical diversity because I feel like the kind of music I listen to on a daily basis is not the same kind of music I play on the guitar. So it really forces me to listen to other kinds of music that I like.
Q: Did you have any additional music-related subjects throughout your bachelor’s studies?
AND: No. When I came to MIT, I wanted to focus on Spanish. [humanities, arts, and social sciences requirement] because I studied Spanish for nine or ten years. But then, seeing the wealth of music classes, I realized that this was something I really wanted to take advantage of. I think music was something that I always wanted to do, but I never had the resources until now. With music and other areas of life, I’ve learned that sometimes it’s good to just not know what your plan is, to be very open and see what happens.
Q: Even if you don’t have a specific plan, do you think you could return to Ghana in the future?
AND: I hope to return someday and contribute to the socio-economic uplift of my country. I envision starting a foundation that not only provides access to cutting-edge technology to solve intricate problems, but also helps provide high-quality, affordable educational opportunities. Although I have had this goal for some time, my friend William Hector inspired me to look at driving change in this way. I’m still not sure exactly how I’ll do it, but with each day that passes, the path forward gets a little clearer.