Hip-hop, basketball and street fashion formed the three pillars of cool for Oscar when he was a child. Common to all these phenomena was the ultimate commodified object of cool—the sneaker. And he loved sneakers. So, it is of no surprise that Oscar’s earliest memory of being or looking cool was attributed to a pair of Nike Air Jordan XI. This childhood photo of him with the Nike Swoosh shaved and dyed into the back of his head can attest to that.

Dayoung’s thesis, Pygmalion, is about creating systems to empower people with social anxiety disorder. She aims to create the Pygmalion effect—also known as the “self-fulfilling prophecy”—to help people with social anxiety. The Pygmalion effect, named after an Ancient Greek myth of a sculptor falling in love with his own works that comes to life, is the phenomenon whereby high expectations and attentions positively affect the outcome of performance.

Conventional wisdom tells us that eco-anxiety—an indirect mental health impact of climate change—is preventing us from effectively responding to the threat of climate change. This form of anxiety is also marked by an existential worry about the future for oneself, children, and later generations. Karen Vellensky challenges this idea through her thesis, Good Grief: Inducing eco-anxiety as a call to climate action.