Caroline giving a speech in a meeting for Our Revolution – Cambridge.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Caroline Mak, a fellow MIT student of the class of 2018, and an eager student activist working in the MIT community and the greater Cambridge community. We started off talking about Caroline’s journey towards being more engaged in activism in the realm of local politics and voter registration. Previous to coming to college she considered herself generally disengaged from politics, found that her journey towards activism started by being inspired by Bernie’s sanders political campaign and integrating it within the MIT community. After registering to vote, she realized the process was super easy, and then was inspired to start helping others register in MIT. Over the course of several months she helped get students involved in Bernie’s campaign through mailing lists, restarted the MIT Democrats group (which had been dormant for 13 years), and worked on a app called VoteMate to facilitate the process of getting people engaged in politics through being registered to vote. Post-election, she also helped create an installation in MIT’s Lobby 7, allowing students to write their fears and thoughts about the election results on the lobby pillars. She also began to be involved in the greater Cambridge community – she worked with the group Our Revolution, which built off of Bernie’s Campaign in light of post-election results to continue momentum for action and organization on a community level. Many of the experiences she valued from being in this group deal with being able to meet such a diverse group of activists from all over, with assorted passions and backgrounds.
Caroline hopes to get people more involved politically – and in the interview mentioned that one of her biggest accomplishments was being able to narrow down what specific community she wants to see this change in. She hopes to be able to focus her energy on making the MIT community more socially active – with voter registration being one of the simplest, yet most impactful ways of getting individuals involved. Additionally, she hopes of implementing a pyramid-type structure of activists within MIT’s community among different departments that can help point people to relevant resources and opportunities to get involved, from very small actions such as registering to vote, to larger actions such as organizing events.
Caroline’s hope for the future is to see some of the passionate and committed young activists she’s met get recognition as leaders within governmental positions. She really hopes by 2030 that people taking office, both local and national, will reflect more diverse identities and experiences.
