What I’m Doing This Summer: Kira Baker ’26

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What are you doing this summer?

I went on a 10-day immersion in Taiwan. We visited farms, indigenous cultural centers, food production centers, factories, kitchens, and farm-to-table restaurants, all working with food and its relationship to culture.

Who led the immersion?

Genevieve Leung, our professor, was incredible. She had such a personal relationship with everybody we visited, which made it exponentially better, because it's one thing to visit these people but it's another to sit down and ask them about their lives and what drew them into this work and how we can help them. But also, do you want us here? Those are hard questions to ask. And then to have the people in Taiwan be so wonderful and to tell us that building friendships with them is the best way we can support them — those interactions on the ground are much more powerful when we come home, because we can share those personal stories, not just facts about the country.

Tell us a story.

I studied in Japan last fall, and I did a language-intensive program, and I think it’s important to thank people for the things they do — to thank them aloud, in their language. And so in Japan I learned pretty quickly how to communicate gratitude in Japanese. But when we went to Taiwan, I didn't learn Taiwanese or Mandarin before we got there, and so for the first five or six days it was hard for me to not be able to tell the people we were meeting how grateful I was to them for feeding us, for teaching us. And then we went to one farm with this woman named Joyce. She turned her farm into an indigenous cultural center, teaching people arts that aren’t necessarily popular anymore. And she happened to speak Japanese, among other languages. So Joyce served us this beautiful dinner and showed us a dance and sang for us, and at the end of it I got to tell her thank you, and express fully that I'm grateful for this particular dish and for her being so kind, and to give her a hug and to know that she didn't have to hear it from me through a translator but just from my mouth to her ears. It was the coolest thing.

Any big discoveries or surprises?

I think one of the biggest things we learned was because none of us really spoke the language, there's so much more sympathy you have for second-language learners when you are the person who’s trying to learn that second language. And then also we had so much fun trying foods that either we hadn't had before or were substantially different, substantially better in Taiwan. Like pineapples. Taiwan’s pineapples are incredible. And to eat them in the very place they’re grown made such a big difference in our appreciation. As people of San Francisco and California, we pride ourselves on organics and making sure we’re not wasting anything, but in Taiwan it's not even a thought. It's just the way they care for what they eat, which is awesome.

What’s your major?

I'm a physics major, with a triple minor in mathematics, Jewish studies and social justice, and Asian studies.

Your plans?

They’ve been changing for the past year. When I went into physics I was convinced that I would work in a lab, working with very specific projects and ideas. But now I’m thinking about consulting, hopefully with a consulting firm. It's really hard for me to be given a project or product or assignment and not know my target audience, so consulting is really appealing to me, just because you get to meet the people that you're producing for. And you get to understand a very niche thing such as specific material sciences or even a field of medicine, for example, and continue learning until you come up with a solution. And then you get to do it all over again in a new place with new people working on a new problem.