When Kiel Domingo, a Business Administration major at Mapúa Malayan Colleges Laguna (Mapúa MCL) first signed up to join this summer’s Sustainability and Innovation Summer Experience at Arizona State University (ASU), the most innovative university in the United States, he was curious to “see what it’s all about.”
The second annual ASU Sustainability and Innovation Summer Experience program held in June of 2023 brought together a diverse group of students from ASU-Cintana Alliance partner institutions around the globe to empower them to become catalysts for change in their communities and equip them with the knowledge and skills to tackle global challenges.
Over the course of two weeks, Kiel and a group of 20+ other students engaged in diverse activities designed to foster their personal and academic growth. They attended classes, lectures, and workshops led by community entrepreneurs and ASU experts from various colleges and schools including the School of Sustainability and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society within the ASU College of Global Futures, Makerspace in the Hayden Library, and the Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Living in Arizona, Domingo got to see and live for himself an America he had only seen and heard on TV. “In terms of actually watching stuff and then experiencing it, America is a sprawling, car-centric land,” he said.
“And that people thought I was local for the most part; maybe it’s my accent. I grew up having English as my first and primary language. But ours is a mixed household, so we grew up with Filipino and Cebuano, too,” Domingo explained.
He was paired with a Mexican classmate, and there was “no language barrier; we got along pretty well. We figured out that Tagalog has some Spanish, so I picked up on what he was saying most of the time when he spoke Spanish to his family in France. So interesting to find out that we have much more in common than we first thought.”
The ASU Sustainability and Innovation Summer Experience offered him two weeks filled with interactive workshops, inspirational lectures, hands-on activities, and immersive experiences focused on building sustainable and innovative solutions for the world’s toughest challenges.