Calvin Jacinto Macatantan

What’ve you enjoyed most about your area of study? Was there a particular discovery, new skill or way of thinking, or insight that you found especially valuable? Please share an example from your favorite class or experience.

Within Applied International Studies, I’ve been focused on understanding international socio-economic and educational infrastructure. I have enjoyed comparing education and development systems in the United States with systems abroad, particularly in Latin America and Southeast Asia-Pacific. Studying these systems has helped me understand how policy, culture, and resource distribution shape educational opportunity and long-term social mobility. This field has also strengthened my ability to think with a global perspective while remaining attentive to local context and community needs.

One of my most meaningful academic experiences was STS.S22: How to Grow Resilient Futures: Regenerative Agriculture and Economies in Catalunya, Spain, an IAP Global Classroom that examined ecological and economic alternatives to industrial food systems. The course explored how food production contributes significantly to global carbon emissions, deforestation, water depletion, and environmental toxicity, while also analyzing how activists, farmers, and cooperative organizations in Catalunya are developing more sustainable and equitable food, labor, and ownership systems. The course also introduced me to degrowth-oriented ways of thinking, encouraging me to reconsider consumption habits and sustainability from both personal and systemic perspectives. These lessons continue to influence my research interests and motivate me to pursue work that ensures technology is equitable and sustainable.

I’m currently taking 17.591: Seminar in Applied International Studies, where I’m studying the legacies of U.S. colonial governance in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawai‘i through language education policy. The seminar is sharpening how I analyze national identities, linguistic power, and institutional continuity through lenses of decolonization.

How does the knowledge from this field, or your interest in it, combine with your other major or minor studies at MIT?

Applied International Studies connects directly with my Planning major because planning trains me to analyze how institutions, infrastructure, and policy design shape outcomes in the lives of others. Planning gives me spatial and structural tools: how governance is organized, how resources flow, how systems scale or fail. AIS expands that analysis beyond the U.S. context. It forces me to test whether the institutional logics I take for granted are universal or historically contingent. That comparative lens makes my planning work more disciplined and less assumption-driven.

It also intersects with my Computer Science & Engineering major and Mathematics minor in a more technical way. CS and math give me formal tools like modeling, optimization, statistical inference, and systems design. AIS provides the institutional and political context in which those tools operate. For example, when thinking about machine learning in education or governance, AIS pushes me to ask who defines the objective function, whose data is represented, and how historical inequalities are embedded in the system. The technical training enables implementation; AIS shapes how I evaluate impact and legitimacy.

These fields let me move between algorithmic design to institutional incentives to cross-cultural governance structures. AIS also strengthens my intercultural communication skills, which matter when technical systems are deployed across different political and linguistic contexts.

An MIT education includes study in the scientific, technical, social science, arts, and humanities fields. How do you think that wide range of knowledge and perspectives will be valuable to you – for your career success and for your enjoyment of life?

MIT has taught me to approach problems through an interdisciplinary lens. Technical courses train me to formalize problems, specify constraints, and optimize under resource limits. Humanities, arts, and social science courses force me to interrogate assumptions embedded in those models: who defines the objective, which variables are omitted, and how power structures shape outcomes. That combination matters for career success because many high-impact problems, such as the energy demands of data centers or the deployment of AI in public systems, are socio-technical. They require coordination across engineering, economics, governance, ethics, and more. Training across these domains reduces the risk of building systems that are technically efficient but institutionally naïve.

The interdisciplinary structure also changes how I think day to day. I am more attentive to feedback loops between technical systems and human behavior, and more comfortable moving between quantitative modeling and qualitative institutional analysis. This flexibility is shaping my research trajectory and is affecting how I interpret the world around me. It makes the world more legible and, in that sense, more interesting.

What are your plans for the future?

After graduating, I plan to pursue a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, focusing on machine learning and database systems. I am drawn to questions about how data infrastructure shapes what institutions are able to measure, optimize, and ultimately value, especially in education and other public systems. During the MEng, I hope to deepen my work on large-scale data management and learning systems, with attention to sustainability and accountability. After, I intend to pursue a PhD, to do research in improving data systems and better understand how they can operate across different academic and policy environments.

Long term, I want to combine my research with science communication. I want to build technical systems, but I want to do more: I want to help people understand them. There are many strong engineers and many strong communicators, but fewer people who move comfortably between technical design and public conversation. I want to help bridge this gap. When AI and data systems shape classrooms, hiring, or public policy, communities deserve clarity about how those systems work and what tradeoffs they carry. I believe clear communication strengthens transparency, accountability, and democratic decision-making; I want to work on complex systems while making sure they translate into language that invites participation.