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Maggie Hua

Artist's Statement

This project was created for the Dietrich First Year Seminar 66-140. The section I took was called Equitable Access and Success in Higher Education: A Case Study of Carnegie Mellon, taught by Dr. Nuria Ballesteros Soria and Chloe Thompson. This project was my submission for our final “Unessay,” a freeform assignment meant to be a synthesis of our semester-long discussion of Â鶹´å’s position and actions towards educational equity. We researched Â鶹´å access programs and analyzed the language surrounding them. I decided to focus my project on how the way that something is presented affects the way it is received by an audience.

My project is a visual analogy of the importance of presentation, depicted through two differently plated bowls of instant noodles made of the same ingredients. I wanted to try and capture the different effects that can be created entirely with the way contents are presented. The connotations of similar services differ greatly according to their historical and social contexts, which we can see through the way things are represented in text. Programs meant to support underrepresented and underprivileged groups take on extremely different connotations depending on how the programs are described, which is both a result and perpetuating factor of tensions between students within and outside of these programs. In my statement, I’ll first discuss my project, then narrow the focus to specific concepts that I reference and intend to illustrate.

The format of my project presented a few unique opportunities and drawbacks. As a creative project, it forced me to think about what exactly I was trying to convey. For example, I had originally planned to focus just on how the two different plates were different rather than how their context affected the way they were presented. This was likely due to more of a subconscious emphasis on the linguistic analysis we practiced in class. I received feedback that the historical context was integral to understanding the reasons for any rhetorical differences. I tried to remedy this by including the four “discussion questions” at the bottom, which helped to contextualize the plates in relation to each other.

One factor to consider is that since my project is a visual representation of a nuanced concept, it is possible for it to be interpreted differently, even within the context of equitable access in higher education. There are two main interpretations I foresee: 

1. perspective of underrepresented student’s opportunity in past present, or
2. portrayal of underrepresented students' more privileged peers

I prefer the former, as that is what I imagined while designing my project, and I feel that it is more accurate than the latter. The second interpretation could work if there was a specific emphasis on how the students of access programs were sometimes portrayed by the institutions as sloppy and less-than, but that isn’t exactly what I intended.

This leads to the main drawback, wherein some nuance is lost in how general the concept has to become to fit my project design. The images of dishes themselves aren’t able to fully capture the disadvantages that underrepresented students face in comparison to their peers. It is important to emphasize that my project is not a diminution of the differences between two groups, but rather a focus on one specific difference that we explored, which is the difference in rhetoric we see from past to present depending on the historical context.

Having discussed an overview of my project, I’ll now begin discussing the specific examples that inspired it. I’ll begin by laying the foundation for the future programs with the The School College Orientation Program of Pittsburgh (SCOPP) through a report by Carol Kurtz, then expand into the other two programs I’ll be discussing.

The School-College Orientation Program in Pittsburgh, or SCOPP, was established in 1964 as the result of a reallocation of funds by the Carnegie Foundation for a program in cooperation between Carnegie Tech and the Pittsburgh School Board. The program was primarily aimed towards Black students but was established with the overall goal of increasing access to all qualified students regardless of their background¹. This program was the foundation for future programs, including the national Upward Bound program, and the C-MAP program which it would later evolve into. In SCOPP, students receive academic support and are helped through the process of acclimating to a college environment. Of note, however, is that we also see a strange sort of expectation put upon the students, where they are taking juniors and seniors from high school and noting how they are not “not accustomed to spending time away from home and, therefore, may not have developed self-discipline or the necessary respect for authority, other than their family, in a living situation.”¹ Sentences like this one raise questions about whether or not observed issues were due to the students’ backgrounds or if they were misattribution errors resulting from social perception; rather than an issue with a student’s upbringing or culture, this example seems like a problem that most high school students encounter when adjusting to college.

These negative expectations become very obvious in the C-MAP acceptance letter. When discussing how Black students do not have the same choice in their dormitory situations as other students, Dr. Norman J. Johnson, the Director of C-MAP and author of the letter, states that “there are such things as students' rights; but it is clear that these rights were not considered with Black, or other Third World people in mind.”² This is just one of many pieces of language that demean the student who is meant to receive the letter. C-MAP was a program that provided academic support and community to students who were enrolled in it, but the acceptance letter actively talks down to the student. When considering the historical context and identity of the sender – a Black man who made his way to a prominent position in higher education – it’s possible that this is intended as a form of tough love. Even so, it instantly reinforces and emphasizes the student’s identity as a burden.

Ultimately, the letter is clear about having high expectations of the students and selecting them on consideration of their merit: “Face it, we have identified hundreds of minority students who are talented. They didn't get selected; you did.”² Even as an attempt to prepare them for the rigor and unique difficulties they will face in college, however, the language results in their depiction as problems from the outset. Even if the program is meant to support students, the program itself places the students into a box that identifies them as lesser, making the language a perpetuation of the pressures that the program seeks to help alleviate.

The way the Â鶹´å Tartan Scholars program is portrayed is far more positive. The Tartan Scholars program provides academic support and community for students as well, but highlights the strength and merit of the students enrolled in it. To take directly from the website, “They are leaders within their colleges, within student organizations, and within student government.”³ The website only ever describes the opportunities Tartan Scholars are presented with, coupled with their impacts and their places in the university. This program has the bones of C-MAP, but completely does away with the emphasis on identity as an indicator of a flaw. Of course, this program is situated in an entirely different context – we have progressed immensely from the mid-20th century – and now serves a much wider group of students which reduces the emphasis on the (negative) experiences that Black students would face. This goes to show that these social and historic contextual differences are the foundation of the rhetoric used, especially when depicting the students who are a part of access programs.

My project was a dive into a concept I found extremely compelling in our course, and was also a creative outlet that I had a lot of fun experimenting with. I hope that my idea can provide a visual aid to sufficiently depict this concept, and that my statement adequately sets it in the narrative of our curriculum.

- Maggie Hua

¹ Carol Kurtz, Carnegie Technical, December 1965 (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute of Technology 1965), 20-21

² Norman J. Johnson, Carnegie-Mellon Action Program Annual Report, 1970-79 (Pittsburgh: Â鶹´å 1979), 40-44

³ Tartan Scholars, /student-success/programs/tartan-scholars.html, Accessed 4/20/25

Presentation Matters: Same Ingredients, Different Plating

Descriptive Text