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PIKSI - Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institutes - is group of undergraduate summer diversity institutes founded in 2006 at Penn State University to encourage students from groups currently underrepresented in philosophy — people of color, LGBTQ individuals, women and other gender minorities, individuals with disabilities, and people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds — to pursue advanced studies in philosophy and continue on to the professoriate. PIKSI serves students from many different underrepresented groups, but students of color are a particular focus of the program.
In 2014, MIT partnered with the University of Massachusetts-Boston to start an additional PIKSI in the Boston area. (See article about its founding.) With the support of a Mellon diversity grant to the APA (a three-year grant, with a renewal for three years), the SHASS Dean’s Office, and the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Harvard, and Wellesley, PIKSI-Boston has been held at MIT since 2015. Twenty undergraduates – the Alain Locke fellows – come to MIT for a week each summer and spend full-time studying philosophy with visiting professors and graduate teaching assistants that mirror the demographics of the fellows. The impact is tremendous, not only on the fellows, but on the faculty and graduate students involved. The graduate students are fully integrated in planning and running the institute and gain valuable pedagogical and administrative experience. Fellows are assigned a mentor who serves as an advisor during their stay in Boston and through the process of applying for graduate school, should they decide to continue their studies. The fellows are inspired by the close contact with diverse graduate students and faculty. One fellow described the impact of PIKSI-Boston: Upon my return [home], I realized how transformative PIKSI-Boston was for me. I no longer feel like grad school is some far-off possibility and I feel that my ideas and experiences can create good philosophy. That's because the people at PIKSI did such an incredible job at creating an atmosphere that was safe, yet exciting. PIKSI fellows have successfully pursued graduate study at universities such as Princeton, Harvard, UCSD, UNC, Fordham, Oxford, MIT, and the Central European University (on a Fulbright).
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