Episode 7: Creating ideal education systems
In this episode of Imagine A World, Aditya Vishwanath (2018 cohort), a graduate of the PhD program in Learning Sciences and Technology Design, shares his experiences with education and vision for its future. He discusses his journey from memorizing his way through school exams in India to founding education reform organizations, all while finding the time to catch some Pokémon along the way.
Guest
Photo courtesy Micaela Go.
Aditya Vishwanath (2018 cohort), from Chennai, India, graduated with a PhD in Learning Sciences and Technology Design at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He aspires to a career designing and building educational technology for diverse learning environments around the world. As the founder and CEO of Inspirit, a virtual reality education company, he focuses on developing technologies that support universal access to immersive learning content.
Previously, he worked with the Google Education team where he explored strategies to integrate low-cost virtual reality toolkits into curriculum, and was a three-time recipient of the President’s Undergraduate Research Award at Georgia Tech. Before Inspirit, he co-founded MakerGhat, a makerspace and incubator for youth from low-income communities in urban Mumbai.
Hosts
Imagine A World is hosted by Willie Thompson, left, and Taylor Goss, right.
Taylor Goss (2021 cohort), from Lacassine, Louisiana, is pursuing an MA in music, science, and technology and an MPP in public policy at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences. He graduated with college honors from Louisiana State University with bachelor's degrees in music and entrepreneurship. Taylor aspires to connect musicians and policymakers, using the arts to communicate societal needs and provoke policy change.
Willie Thompson (2022 cohort), from Griffin, Georgia, is pursuing a master's degree in business administration at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He graduated summa cum laude from Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a minor in Chinese Studies. He intends to create and contribute to organizations using the arts as a conduit for community building and intercultural education.
Imagine A World's theme music was composed and recorded by Taylor Goss. The podcast was originally conceived and led by Briana Mullen (2020 cohort), Taylor Goss, and Willie Thompson, along with Daniel Gajardo (2020 cohort) and Jordan Conger (2020 cohort).
Special thanks to Sanaa Alam, Rachel Desch, Sydney Hunt, Chan Leem, Kara Schechtman, Takondwa Priscilla Semphere, and Rahul Thapa.
Knight-Hennessy scholars represent a vast array of cultures, perspectives, and experiences. While we as an organization are committed to elevating their voices, the views expressed are those of the scholars, and not necessarily those of KHS.
Full transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated by machine and lightly edited by humans. They may contain errors.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah, that's a very important question. I don't think we're anywhere near re-imagining education as we should be. I would say, actually, one thing that everybody should do is really read up on the history of education in the places that they grew up in. You'll realize that the history of where education comes from, where modern school going education comes from, very often is pretty complex. It is influenced by many forces in history that one may have not expected or even thought about.
The American education system has deep roots in colonialism too. It has deep roots in the church, for instance as well. There are many ways in which those legacies still show up, in ways that are sometimes great and sometimes not so great. I think what is necessary is for people to make space, to take a step back, and try to ask the hard questions. The hallmark of an ideal education system is one that has the capacity to evolve.
I'm Aditya Vishwanath, I am an alum of the 2018 cohort, and I earned a PhD in the Learning Sciences and Technology Design Program at the Graduate School of Education. I imagine a world where education systems around the globe empower children, all children, to reach their full potential.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Imagine a World podcast from Knight Hennessy Scholars. We are here to give you a glimpse into the Knight-Hennessy Scholar community of graduate students, spanning all seven Stanford schools, including business, education, engineering, humanities, law, medicine, and sustainability. In each episode, we talk with scholars about the world they imagine, and what they are doing to bring it to life.
Willie Thompson:
Today, we're speaking with Aditya Vishwanath, a KHS alum and PhD recipient in learning sciences and technology design. During our conversation, you'll hear Aditya's experience growing up in a family of educators, developing human-centered design strategies that enable children to imagine and reimagine a quality education, his insane memory, and so much more.
Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of the Imagine a World podcast. I'm your co-host, Willie Thompson, as always, joined by my fantastic co-host and co-producer in all things, Taylor Goss.
Taylor Goss:
Hello, sir. Glad to be here.
Willie Thompson:
Hey, man, glad to have you here. We have Aditya here. You've heard his amazing Imagine a World statement. Welcome to Imagine a World, Aditya. How are you doing today?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Thank you. I'm doing well, and I am so excited to be a part of this. Thank you folks for organizing this. This is so fun.
Willie Thompson:
Of course. We were talking about this off camera. Is the proper way to talk to you, Doctor? Do we have to refer to you as Doctor throughout the rest of this podcast?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah. Look, I'm still new to this. I got my PhD maybe just a few months ago. I'm very comfortable with just being called Aditya,
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, newly minted doctor, but not doctor, nonetheless.
Willie Thompson:
I know, exactly. It's a lot of work.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Aditya is fine.
Willie Thompson:
Is that what you'll tell your students when you teach them?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Willie Thompson:
Oh, wow.
Aditya Vishwanath:
100%.
Willie Thompson:
I love that.
Taylor Goss:
You'll take a point off the quiz if they call you Doctor. Exactly.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Exactly. Yeah, that's right.
Willie Thompson:
That's so funny. Well, look, you have an amazing Imagine a World statement, and like all of us in Knight-Hennessy, like equally amazing story. Before we can get into the Imagine a World statement, we want to talk about the world you were born into and the world you've experienced thus far. To that end, our first question, as is always, where are you from, and what was your journey here?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. I was born in the South Indian city of Chennai, in India, but I grew up in a total of, I want to say close to 10 different cities until I was the age of 18. I went to almost 15 different elementary, middle, and high schools across three different countries. I grew up in India across multiple cities, in the Middle East, in multiple different countries.
Every place I grew up in, given the way India is as a country, had spoke a different language, people from very different cultural backgrounds, even if they were Indian or not. To me, change was always a constant, and I have seen so many different types of education systems, so many different types of schooling environments, some that I loved, some that I absolutely hated, and then I did my higher education abroad. I moved to the United States for my undergrad, jumped to do a PhD after that.
Have seen learning systems in so many different ways, and I think that has really deeply shaped my experience and my intuition around what I would like to do in education, and how I would like to shape the field in meaningful ways moving forward. I also come from a family of educators. My mother has been a career teacher, and then later, an administrator and school principal. I have grandparents who have been educators.
I have always had the passion of wanting to be and have been a teacher as well, mostly in a volunteering capacity every single year for the last, I want to say now, eight or nine years, whenever there has been a summer break or a winter break out of school, I would end up in a classroom, usually a middle school classroom. I would just either be a fly on the wall and tell the school teacher that I just want to sit in the corner, give me a chair, or don't even give me a chair, just give me a space where I can just take notes and observe what's happening, or I would be an active teacher or a participant in the classroom scene.
I've just really enjoyed being in learning environments, and I've done that in extreme rural parts, rural, low-income, underserved parts of India, to rural low-income, underserved parts of Tennessee and Georgia, to very high-end, urban private schools in both these countries. I've really seen school systems of all shapes and sizes. I think all of those experiences have deeply shaped why and how I think about it and why I care so much about education.
Willie Thompson:
Wow, wonderful story. Also, as a son of an educator, glad to have another education kid, I don't know, a teacher's kid, a teacher's kid on the pod.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Oh, yes.
Willie Thompson:
It's a specific experience. I don't know sort of how this manifested for you, but it always manifested, in my experience, in elementary and middle school of, "Are you doing what you need to be doing? If not, I'll just call your mom." I was like, "You never do this for anybody else. Just because she's in the school system."
Aditya Vishwanath:
Oh, yes, absolutely. Also in the other part of it is you realize how hard it is to be a teacher.
Willie Thompson:
Oh, man.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Wherever... My mother is my role model. She's going to listen to this podcast someday, and she's going to hear this as well. All of us in my family can agree that she put in so much into her job. Her job never ended when school ended. You're doing grading, you're talking to parents, you're prepping for next day. Teaching time is a very small part of their job.
There's so much admin work, so much prep work that goes into being a teacher that just goes under recognized and underappreciated. That is true for teachers all over the world. It's such an incredible profession, I think, and a difficult one to be in.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. To that point, though, knowing the difficulties and challenges associated with education, why did you choose to make this your field of study? Yeah.
Taylor Goss:
Yeah, you've been doing it for a long time. You were 14 whenever you started volunteering and researching in this capacity, right?
Willie Thompson:
Right.
Aditya Vishwanath:
I think so. I grew up primarily until I was 18 in the Indian education system. The way I would describe the Indian education system is one that is deeply rooted, and this is probably true for most education systems, it is rooted in colonialism. It is a relic of the colonial era in many ways. We still, in many ways, have preserved that. The assembly line model of teaching students in large masses the same standardized information, standardized testing, no real regard for context, for cultural context, for all sorts of other factors.
I was a product of that system. One element that is very unique to the Indian education system is it was very, very heavily steeped in rote memorization and rote learning. Now, it so happened that I had, and probably still do, have very good memory, so I thrived in the Indian education system. In fact, one story I like to tell people is one of the exams that you take in 10th grade, which is called our board exam, you take an exam in languages as well.
I had to learn English and Hindi as part of my learning. I am a terrible Hindi speaker. I came from a family that primarily spoke English, and we are Tamilians. We are from a state in South India, so Tamil is our primary language, not Hindi. I really struggled. Even though I have a lot of Hindi speakers in my family and people around me, I really struggled with Hindi. I used to just memorize. I used to just memorize essays.
You can game the grammar stuff, you can game all the other stuff, but what you cannot game are the essays, the long form questions that come in the test, where you have to... They'll give you a topic and you have to write...
Aditya Vishwanath:
... test where they'll give you a topic and you have to write multiple paragraphs about it, that you need to really have a strong grasp about the language. So what I did was I would look at previous years exams for the last 15 years, and I would compile a list of 100 essay topics that have showed up. And I saw patterns where they would repeat every few years or so. And then I literally sat down with my dad and my grandmom, and I had them write out 300 word essays for almost 50 different such topics. I memorized each and every one of them.
Speaker 2:
No.
Aditya Vishwanath:
I memorized the symbols. I don't even know what some of the words meant. I just memorized sounds. It would be like you memorizing Hindi, right? Right now-
Speaker 3:
That would be me. That would be me.
Speaker 2:
Completely phonetically. No context.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Exactly. Just the sounds. And then something showed up in an exam that I had memorized, I just vomited it. I was a topper. I top my grade in Hindi. And that's the point I'm trying to make because I had friends who were significantly more profoundly just brilliant at language, at sciences, at math, at all these other subject areas much more than me. But they were completely crushed by the system because they had poor memory. And so I think I left that education system, clearly, I mean academically, very successful and then that landed me into a very good higher education institution. I did very well until this point of time. And I look back and I realize I did well despite the system, not because of the system. And that is true for everybody that is a product of the Indian education system and many education systems around the world.
And that left a very uncomfortable feeling in me where I realized we were really losing a lot of talent, a lot of massive opportunity in pushing forward innovation and pushing forward incredible humans to do wonderful things who are being completely suppressed by the system. And I wanted to find ways to really fix that. And all the work I do in some way is trying to address that big question.
Speaker 2:
Beautiful.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that's incredible. It was clear that you have from a young age, this passion for reform and education through your personal experience, things you noticed about your own experience and also your family was clearly supportive. If they were willing to sit down and write many, many essays on your behalf, clearly they were supportive.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:
So did you feel a drive of motivation going into your undergraduate experience to you were straight arrow into this field for sure?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah, that's a good question. I think people around me have told me that I tend to carry a lot of clarity and I tend to have discovered a lot of clarity. I don't feel that way. I mean, I always think within myself I sense a lot of conflict in ideas and thinking and in stuff. But externally, I'm told that I tend to have a very clear sense of meaning or purpose or vision in terms of what I want to do.
And so externally, yes, I mean, I went into computer science, I really was excited about building tools. I think I felt very restless thinking about problems. I wanted to find ways to actively do stuff. And so I saw engineering as a very powerful way to build things that would see tangible, immediate impact.
I have a funny story that I want to share here because I remember the first time I went into a classroom in a very rural part of South India. Just to paint a picture. It was 150 square feet room, kids in middle school, around 35 children in this room sitting on the floor, no furniture, one teacher teaching something in the class, sixth grade. And then I went up to the teacher after classes, this was after my first year of undergrad. And I told the teacher that, look, I'm coming from the US. I am doing an undergrad in computer science. I can build apps. I can build websites. I can build really cool stuff. Tell me all your problems and I'll fix them. And she looked at me and she kind of just burst out laughing. And she said, "Look, we don't really have any problems. You tell me how we can help you."
And that was really a massive defining moment for me because I thought that technology was the answer, but I didn't realize what the question was that we were trying to solve for. Like, sure, it's the answer, but what is the question? And the moment she said that I opened my eyes and I noticed that that classroom had tablets. There were tablets that were donated by a nonprofit organization. There was a wifi hotspot that existed there. All the kids came from families where they had smartphones. So digital access existed. Still these children were probably struggling to afford more than two square meals a day. Still they had never really left the two kilometer radius of the community that they grew up in. And they were clearly very much in poverty.
So it left me very confused as an engineer thinking that engineering was the way in which I could solve these problems. I could airdrop cool technologies that would fix education. And I realized that, well, in many cases these tools were just sitting on the shelf collecting test. And then I saw that story play itself out again and again. I mean, when I was in Atlanta for many years I used to go a lot into schools, mostly Title 1, low-income public schools in the city. And I would end up in these classrooms and I would see these kids with the latest iPhones, the schools would have smart boards and fancy gadgets and computers.
But these children, I mean, there was no career prospect for them. I mean, these children had no sense of purpose or meaning in them. Not for their own fault. They had massive ambition, massive drive. But the education system was set up in such a way that they were not going to succeed. They were coming from either single parent homes. There was no adequate sense of agency or support in the curriculum or the program that afforded them meaningful opportunities to build skills, to build meaningful skills beyond just the stuff that they have to learn for the test. And there wasn't really a community that was being fostered with the right mentors, with the right role models, all the role models that were presented to them did not look like them, did not belong to the communities they came from.
So I saw the same stories play out again and again where technology was being seen as the solution that would solve everything, it was dropped by the funders or by the top-down intervention players and then they left thinking that the problem was solved. And so you then go back to the big funders and the big organizations, and even the academics sometimes who sit in ivory towers and you tell them, "Look, there are still massive intersectional problems over here that are not going to be solved tomorrow." And they tell you, "Well, but all these kids have laptops and they can access Khan Academy and YouTube and TED Talks. So what's the problem? I mean, they can find with internet, with online learning." And this was now almost 10 years ago. That was the big thing then, online learning, the MOOCs and the online courses and all of that-
Speaker 2:
MOOCS, edX, Coursera. Yeah.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Exactly. And they were like, this is going to fix everything. I mean, you want to be a software engineer, you want to be a mechanic, you can learn that online. And so they're going to go online, they're going to learn it.
The same thing was happening in India too. These kids had access to Khan Academy translated in 12 different languages and so there was not contextual, just language specific content that was available, and there was still a massive gap. And that led me to then want to do a PhD in education, where I realized that the technology bit of it is relatively well understood. It was the human and the learning and all the other socio-technical dimensions that were absolutely not well understood. And I wanted to go deeper into that space and center the learner, center the learner, center the teacher. Not center the technology, which was what I was seeing happening a lot around me back then.
Speaker 3:
I think that says a lot about your critical analysis and about sort of your selflessness because you walked in as an expert in a field and you're like, this is what I have to contribute, this is my vision for what can better these children experiences. But you had the ability to stop and really ask the question. Maybe they have the tools, but how are these tools supposed to be used?
Aditya Vishwanath:
I mean, we are inspired by platforms that children come from, from the worlds of ROBLOX and Minecraft, where they are part of worlds where they shape the world, they build it, they engage with peers. And there is an incredible amount of learning that can come out of that when you connect it to curriculum, when you integrate best practices of pedagogy, when you integrate it into the standards of what they should be achieving and what they should be learning based on how these standards are defined in the regions that they live in, you can do some real magic. We had a teacher when we first started in spirit, call us the Magic School Bus for the classroom.
Which for those of you that have not watched the TV show, it's this show where you enter this magical school bus, it shrinks in size, enters the human body. You learn about the cell and the DNA molecules, except, hey, you can fly around and you can manipulate these things. You can touch them. You can shape them. You can go to Mars, you can throw a ball and learn Newton's laws of motion by building the intuition behind how the laws of motion work. It's not just definitions, it's not just facts, but you actually can change gravity. You can go to the Moon and Mars and understand what's happening differently when you throw a ball in both these places.
And if I were to zoom out as well, I mean before Inspirit, I helped co-found another organization called MakerGhat, which is based in India, which is a much more long-term play, it's a nonprofit that builds makerspaces in low-income communities. We have built close to 10,000 makerspaces today, working with almost a million and a half students-
Speaker 2:
And just for folks who are listening, how do you define a makerspace and what is that?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah. So a makerspace, again, is a community space in most cases, where you can come in and use your hands to build anything you want to build. The idea is collaborative problem solving, not restricted to domain, not restricted to tooling-
Aditya Vishwanath:
I'm not restricted to domain, not restricted to tooling. So you can come in and do art and craft, you can come in and do woodworking. You can come in and do quilling and weaving and embroidery. You can come in and do robotics and artificial intelligence and data science, everything under the sun, that is some form of productive making. With peers, ideally towards a problem, a community problem or a social justice problem or some sort of broader problem that you face in your specific community. So it's hyperlocal innovation that's happening that's driven by the community. And makerspaces today as an idea have become so powerful that you will see almost every single school having a makerspace of some form or function. Makerspaces can also... They can look like music rooms. They can look like art and craft rooms. They can look like computer labs as well. All of those are makerspaces where some sort of experimental, innovative work happens, not for some goal, but the goal is the making itself. The goal is making-
Speaker 3:
The act of creation. Yeah.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Exactly. And there's a lot of academic evidence behind, there's a lot of buzzwords I can throw in here that explain why this is the best way to learn and the most powerful way to learn. Within in Spirit, we're trying to do the same thing, just in the digital space. We're saying, let's bring that idea of making in the virtual world with digital 3D objects and tools. But Maker Guard did that in the physical space. We said we need to build infrastructure for this, especially in the most underrepresented regions of the country. But the lens was the same. What I lead with is never the technology, it's never the space, it's never the headset, it's never the VR. It is the experience. It is the opportunity of enabling agency, of giving control, either back to the teacher or back to the student, or back to some stakeholder from whom control was taken away at some point of time in the past.
And I think that's the future. I mean, especially in a world where we are seeing education systems rapidly being threatened by what's happening in the technology world or what's happening in the workforce with rapid automation and innovation and so on, so happening. I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing to reach that point of reckoning where we have to ask fundamental questions.
Willie Thompson:
I will say really quickly, one thing about the Magic School Bus.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Go for it.
Willie Thompson:
I don't know if you remember the episode where they went to the different planets. I think they went to Neptune or something, and one of the kids took off his helmet and his head froze. Do you remember that episode?
Speaker 3:
I don't recall that.
Willie Thompson:
I just remember it was-
Speaker 3:
Dark, gritty Magic School Bus reboot.
Willie Thompson:
It is something I didn't think about as a kid. So he just has a cold. I think he ended up having a cold after when he came back to Earth, he was fine. But as an adult, I'm just like, oh no, he would've died if he had done... Ms. Frizzle should've been sued. That'd be it.
Speaker 3:
So really, when you think about it, Magic School Bus is a dubious comparison.
Aditya Vishwanath:
It's scientifically inaccurate.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah. But I appreciate-
Aditya Vishwanath:
One could argue it's causing more harm than good. No, I'm kidding.
Willie Thompson:
Maybe. But it's a great show.
Speaker 3:
It was a fantastic show.
Willie Thompson:
So you mentioned even earlier, I want to talk a little bit about this agency piece before we get into some of our closing questions. And you mentioned the curriculum reform, how education systems work in the US and other places. And you even mentioned this idea of India having... Well, not idea. The reality that India has a colonial past and creating spaces for new leadership and narratives in the education space. So in your mind, where are we in these conversations around re-imagining education as a force in our societies and in our communities and what that means for the stories that we tell about each other and we tell ourselves?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah, that's a very important question. I don't think we're anywhere near re-imagining education as we should be. I would say actually one thing that everybody should do is really read up on the history of education in the places that they grew up in. And you'll realize that the history of where education comes from, where modern school going education comes from very often is pretty complex. It is influenced by many forces in history that one may have not expected or even thought about. I mean, the American education system has deep roots in colonialism too. It has deep roots in the church, for instance as well. And there are many ways in which those legacies still show up in ways that are sometimes great and sometimes not so great. I think what is necessary is for people to make space, to take a step back and try to ask the hard questions.
The hallmark of an ideal education system is one that has the capacity to evolve. And that is always going to be the case. If I had a magic wand and I designed an education system that I believed was right for 2024, in another five years, there needs to be an ability for somebody else in five years, in 10 years, maybe faster, maybe shorter, who knows? To be able to redo the elements that have become redundant. And it should be done dispassionately. There shouldn't be any ego attached here. There shouldn't be any sentimental value associated. This is just a tool that enables meaningful growth of young people in our society. And we should do everything we can for the tool to be in good shape. And that's how I see it. It's a very complicated machine that needs to be oiled from time to time. Some parts need to be replaced, some parts need to be upgraded or updated, and some parts need to be eliminated because they're legacy systems or legacy parts of the machine.
I think what's nice is people are increasingly recognizing that these conversations need to happen because this is systemic reform. And systemic reform is very, very hard in education. I mean, there are stakeholders that intersect in the weirdest ways possible. I think it's very unique to education. Maybe education, maybe health is the other field where you will see the sort of complexity emerging like nothing else. And I think with, and I mentioned earlier in this talk as well, with the advent of new tools like especially generative AI tools in the world, we are seeing this tsunami that's at our doorstep that is going to crush the system if we do not do something about it. And I think that's great. I know that's going to stress a lot of people out, but I think that's great because it is going to spark people into action, into asking the fundamental questions.
Is the way we do testing correct? Is the way we do teacher training correct? We don't really think about teacher training, but teacher training is one of the most important pillars of a successful, of a well-oiled education system. And most teacher training programs are extremely outdated. Do you think school curriculums are outdated? Look at teacher training curriculums and see how out of date they are. Are we paying our teachers well? Are we supporting our teachers?
Willie Thompson:
No, [inaudible 00:24:25] question is no, we're not paying no one.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Exactly. And this is true everywhere on earth. And so there are questions that need to be addressed and asked in a very fundamental way. What is the role of a teacher in the 21st century and not 21st century, in 2024? It's going to look different in 10 years from now as well. And what is the role of a student?
What is the role of curriculum? What is the role of math? What is the role of science? What is the role of the arts, of languages? And each of those need to be examined and re-examined, and all we can do is create spaces for that to happen in meaningful ways. So I'm excited for the possibilities here. As someone who is looking to really dedicate their career towards this work, I only see incredible opportunities. I think we need to approach this work, like I said, with a lot of care, with a lot of humility, with absolutely no ego because this isn't a game that you win. This isn't a capitalism market, right? This isn't a place where... I don't think you can approach this in a way in which you try to optimize or maximize. I think the way you need to approach this is through the lens of inclusivity, through the lens of real stakeholder conversations that bring every single person to the table. Because you will not have a one size fits all solution here. You cannot. And if you do, then something is wrong.
Willie Thompson:
Right. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:
That's so heartening for me to hear because you have a vivid vision for what should change in the field of education, but also the ability to say it is not one size fits all, and it's not all one time fits all. The answer now may not be the answer tomorrow. I've seen that true both in my life. My articulation of what I wanted to do with my life five years ago is different from what it was now and what might need to change in the education system is going to be different 10 years compared to five years from now. And we don't always hear that notion trumpeted by folks who are wanting to find big solutions that are implementable and flashy and able to be articulated.
Aditya Vishwanath:
The silver bullet.
Speaker 3:
The silver bullet that can be implemented right now. And that I think is so important. And so thank you for sharing that with us. And all this talk of makerspaces and collaboration and dialogue to some degree, it makes me think of the Knight Hennessy Community. And I'm wondering if you can step back into your mindset of when you were starting your PhD program way back, way back before you were a doctor. If you can step back and think about coming to Stanford, beginning your PhD program, and stepping into the Knight Hennessy community. How did Knight Hennessy and the scholars involved in the community impact your experience at Stanford and maybe even as an alum, how-
Speaker 3:
...impact your experience at Stanford?
Willie Thompson:
And maybe even as an alum, how are they impacting you? Because that's also an aspect to the experience as well.
Speaker 3:
You're the first alum we've talked to on this podcast actually.
Aditya Vishwanath:
I was in the very first Knight-Hennessy cohort as well. So 2018, we were the first people. There were 51 of us from 22 different countries around the world. I had never been in a program of that kind. My TLDR, my short answer, is, it was-
Speaker 3:
Too long, didn't read, for those non-Redditors.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yes. It was life-changing. I met people that are now lifelong friends and people who will continue to be shaping my life in very meaningful ways, from walks of life that I never thought I would intersect with. I did engineering, I came from that mindset, and I met people who came from the world of medicine, from the world of law, from all countries, from all walks of life, from all lived experiences, that added to my understanding of the world in ways that I had not imagined before. And I think that's the idea of, when I think about makerspaces and making as well, that's the whole idea, is 1 plus 1 is 3, 1 plus 1 is 10, it's not 2. And that I think was the power of a program like Knight-Hennessy. It was built by the people in it. It was built by the community. The program is the scholars, the program are the people, and that continues to be the case even today.
Willie Thompson:
Beautiful. Maybe going down the similar vein that Taylor mentioned around Knight-Hennessy and Stanford, there are people who are listening to this podcast who hear what you've had to say, hear what any of our other seven guests at this point have had to say. What advice would you have for people who are applying to Stanford and to KH?
Aditya Vishwanath:
I don't have any great advice, but I'll tell you what I did when I applied.
Willie Thompson:
That works, too.
Aditya Vishwanath:
When I applied, I truly approached the application as a way to reflect on myself and on what I had done till that date. And so to me, the application was an opportunity to take out time, because that's the biggest thing. You never really take out time for these sorts of things. You find ways to get yourself busy with everyday stuff, and you don't take out time to do reflection work. And so I took out time to reflect on where I was with my life, with my career, with my interests, with my goals, and just took out some time to organize those ideas in a slightly cohesive way. And when you approach it through that lens of introspection and reflection, the byproduct of that is a good application, is a very strong college application. And that's what ended up happening in my case.
And it's great because it eliminates stress. Because I remember when I actually hit "Submit," I felt so good about the reflection that I did, and I felt like I had so much clarity that it did not matter to me whether Stanford would happen or not at that point, or whether Knight-Hennessy would happen or not. Because I had a sense of where I needed to go, and I figured that it would happen one way or the other, regardless of what was in store for me in the future.
And that was a wonderful place to be in emotionally, mentally, personally. I would encourage that mindset with how one puts together this application, because again, there is no one size fits all application. You look at these scholars, and you have people from all walks of life doing all sorts of incredible and weird stuff, weird in the best possible ways. And I think that is the beauty of a program of this kind, that it gives you the opportunity to be who you are and who you want to be. And I think that's the way one should approach applying to this program.
Speaker 3:
Okay. So I disagree with you. That's very good advice. You do have great advice to offer. That was beautiful. Thank you. So one aspect of this Knight-Hennessy application that we're discussing, that you had such good advice for, is the improbable facts section, which, for me, I think for many people we've talked on this podcast with, was one of the more difficult parts of the application and probably one of the most time intensive. How was that process for you, and would you be willing to share one or two of your improbable facts with the world?
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah, yeah. I think that was the most fun, in retrospect.
Speaker 3:
It is very fun.
Willie Thompson:
In retrospect, that is the key.
Speaker 3:
In retrospect.
Willie Thompson:
In retrospect.
Speaker 3:
In retrospect, is that type two fun? Is that what it's called?
Willie Thompson:
Exactly. That is a perfect way to frame it, in retrospect.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Absolutely. In retrospect, a ton of fun. In the moment of it, absolute hell. Because you don't know if your fact is improbable enough.
Willie Thompson:
So true.
Aditya Vishwanath:
And that's a very dangerous trap to fall into, because then you start doubting whether you are an interesting person, whether you actually have anything worth sharing with the world. And you absolutely do. You always, always do. I think the way I approached it was starting early. That's the only solution, because you get the best ideas when you are on a walk, when you're in the shower, when you're doing something that's completely mundane, and then you're like, "Wait, I'm really good at X," or "Wait, I did this thing when I was 7 or when I was 12," or whatever, and then you see a story coming together.
Speaker 3:
That's why I always bring a tape recorder into the shower with me.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Oh, you do?
Speaker 3:
No. Kidding.
Aditya Vishwanath:
So if I had to share one improbable fact... So okay, I'll share one, which is related to the point I made earlier about having very good memory. So I was really into Pokemon, really, really into Pokemon.
Willie Thompson:
How into Pokemon are we talking here? Because I think we're all '90s babies here, so that was peak Pokemon fandom.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yeah. Let me tell you how into Pokemon I was. So there was a time when I was maybe 13 where there were only four generations. So that ended at exactly 493 Pokemon in the Pokedex. Started with Bulbasaur.
Willie Thompson:
Bulbasaur, yep.
Aditya Vishwanath:
And then ended with Arceus, which was 493.
Willie Thompson:
Oh, Arceus, yeah. Okay.
Aditya Vishwanath:
And there was a point of time when I was 13 where I could recite every single Pokemon in order in which they appeared in the Pokedex with every single stat that they had, their HP to their defense, their attack, their special defense, all the stats that existed. I don't even remember the attributes that were there back then. Their types in order in which they appeared in the Pokedex by generation from 1 to 493. I even knew the edge cases where before Gen 4 came out, there were some changes that were made, and then Gen 4 came out. I even knew those edge cases, but I was like, "Actually, 294 is X, but after Gen 4, it's now 297," or whatever it is. But I could just do that. You could wake me up at 3:00 in the morning and ask me to... And you could tell me, "What's Pokemon number 307?" And I would tell you what that was. I could do that just by recall. All of that is gone, so do not quiz me on that anymore.
Willie Thompson:
Oh no. I'm so into this.
Aditya Vishwanath:
But there was a time when I could do that, and I wrote about that in my improbable facts.
Speaker 3:
I'm so genuinely impressed. I'm so genuinely impressed by this.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Completely wasteful skill.
Willie Thompson:
It's not wasteful.
Speaker 3:
I'm so out of my depth. I don't know anything. If you ask me about a specific Led Zeppelin show in 1972 in Japan, I can tell you, but I can't... I'm sorry.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Nice.
Willie Thompson:
Yeah, there is, yeah, [inaudible 00:33:33].
Aditya Vishwanath:
Arguably more useful of a skill to have.
Speaker 3:
You can make an argument, not a good one. That's amazing. Thank you. Thank you. That's... Yeah.
Willie Thompson:
I'm pretty sure Led Zeppelin is more electric than Pikachu. You know? See? [inaudible 00:33:45]
Speaker 3:
Wow. Oh, Willy.
Willie Thompson:
[inaudible 00:33:47] I'm on a roll with it.
Aditya, thanks so much for coming on this episode of Imagine a World. It's been so great having you on and to have an alum to give us a perspective from what it's like from the outside world, the other side, real life.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Yes, always, super privileged to be a part of this. Thank you as well for your time. This is so wonderful.
Speaker 3:
Oh, we had so much fun. We so treasure you being a part of our community, and thank you for your time, and that was fantastic.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Thank you.
Speaker 3:
A+.
Willie Thompson:
A++. Pokemon 494.
Speaker 3:
There you go.
Willie Thompson:
Level.
Speaker 3:
There you go. All right, man. Take care.
Aditya Vishwanath:
Awesome. Bye.
Speaker 3:
Yay.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Imagine a World, where we hear from inspiring members of the KHS community who are making significant contributions in their respective fields, challenging the status quo, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible as they imagine the world they want to see.
Willie Thompson:
This podcast is sponsored by Knight-Hennessy Scholars at Stanford University, a multidisciplinary, multicultural graduate fellowship program providing scholars with financial support to pursue graduate studies at Stanford while helping equip them to be visionary, courageous, and collaborative leaders who address complex challenges facing the world. Follow us on social media @KnightHennessy, and visit our website at kh.stanford.edu to learn more about the program and our community.
