Every summer, Brown students travel across the globe to explore their interests outside of the classroom. The Herald spoke to three students about how they spent their days — from documenting familial culture to studying brain aging in the lab — during their months away from College Hill.
Josué Morales ’26: Exploring heritage
For Josué Morales ’26, the summer offered a chance to return to his roots — specifically, to his family’s village San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Morales is a recipient of the Royce Fellowship, a University program that funds summer research projects centered around community engagement. As a fellow, he spent two months gathering photos and videos to document the lives of the people in his village, particularly the indigenous language of Zapoteco.
The language is “fading away,” Morales said. “There’s been a lot of initiatives to revitalize the use of the language in the town.”
Throughout the project, he aimed to spotlight the village’s day-to-day customs and stories: “I want to highlight their craft, whether it be an artist, a stay-at-home mom or someone that cooks for a living,” he said. “Their culture is their everyday lives.”
Interviewing a variety of community members, Morales documented local traditions. One artist he spoke with creates papel picado, a traditional Mexican craft that involves cutting colorful designs onto confetti paper. Morales was particularly inspired by his uncle, a moto taxi driver whose insights into local remedies and dances gave Morales a deeper understanding of his heritage.
He noted that the process of filming and editing was new to him, making this personal project as much a creative learning experience as it was an exploration of his culture. “It informed me about who I am and where I come from,” he said.
Morales said his motivations for beginning the documentary project weren’t “necessarily career-related.”
“Because (Brown) is an Ivy, you always hold that pressure to maintain yourself at a top level,” he said. But Morales emphasized that any summer work can be meaningful: “With whatever opportunity I did get, I was going to learn.”
Morales plans to present his documentary to the Royce Fellowship community and hopes to share his work at a Los Angeles film festival, bringing the culture of his village beyond San Jerónimo Tlacochahuaya.
Alicia Wu ’28: Machine learning abroad
Alicia Wu ’28 spent her first summer as a Brunonian diving deep into the world of artificial intelligence. She spent eight weeks in Bengaluru, India, where she interned for the information technology consulting company Infosys. For the duration of her time abroad, she balanced her work on machine learning with immersion into the culture of a new country.
Throughout the internship, Wu’s project was focused on modifying one of Infosys’s coding models. At first, the model could only process inputs of 8,000 tokens, “roughly equivalent to a couple pages worth of code,” she explained.
Wu hoped that by the end of the summer, she could increase this capacity to 16,000 — a task that would require her to change “how the positions of tokens in the input sequence are encoded.”
“I wanted to do machine learning because I wanted to understand the basis of how AI works,” Wu said, noting that she is considering concentrating in computer science at Brown. “I had no understanding of it coming in as an intern.”
Outside of the office, she explored India with her fellow interns, who also hailed from around the globe. On weekends, Wu traveled to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, to Kerala for boating and hiking and to Goa, where lasting Portuguese influence is visible in the formerly colonized region’s identity.
“Getting to see a whole different culture, area and way of living was a really good learning experience,” she said.
While Wu noted that there is often “pressure to get a job or an internship over the summer,” she said that “self-reflection” and a period “full of learning” are ultimately the most important components of a successful college summer.
Emily Morales ’28: In the lab and beyond
Emily Morales ’28 spent her summer balancing lab work at the University of Southern California and service in a bustling cafe.
Morales’s research, conducted in the Cortes Lab at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, focused on how exercise can protect the brain from aging and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Throughout the summer, her main goal was “to learn more protocols,” she said, citing the western blot technique, which involves identifying protein levels in collected samples.
But Morales’s research was not without its challenges: At one point, a machine malfunction caused issues with sample results, rendering previous data unusable. “I had to redo it over and over again,” she said.
She also explained that she was “really nervous” when first beginning her research, but Constanza Cortes, an assistant professor of gerontology at USC and the lab’s principal investigator, talked her through everything.
“I loved my lab,” Morales said. “I loved everyone in there.”
Alongside her research, she worked a part-time job at Kanomwaan, a popular Thai gelato and dessert cafe in Los Angeles. In contrast to Morales’s solitary work at the lab, interacting with customers at the cafe pushed her to socialize and step out of her comfort zone.
“I’m kind of introverted, but this helped me communicate better with other people,” she said, adding that the combination of quiet research and lively customer service work was “a good balance.”
When reflecting on Brown’s summer culture, Morales acknowledged that students, particularly those interested in applying to medical school, can feel the need to obtain prestigious research and internship roles.
But she emphasized that “it’s good to take a break” — particularly after a stressful and busy semester.
