Megan Kwan (CFA’27) came into the Enlight Fellowship with a vision: to bridge the gap between Boston’s art students and the real-world skills they need to thrive beyond graduation. As a College of Fine Arts major and entrepreneurship minor, Megan understood firsthand how individual and isolated creative education can feel. The Enlight Fellowship gave her the tools, time, and community to start changing that.
“I’m working on building cross-university connections within the Boston art schools,” Megan explains. “I want art students to not only have a richer community, full of connections and opportunities, but also feel prepared to take on the workforce after they graduate.” Her project aims to unite students from at least five local art institutions with a lecture series meant to prepare art students for life after school.
The Enlight Fellowship, a ten-week summer program from Innovate@BU, pairs students with a local nonprofit while supporting them in developing their own social venture. Megan split her time between Innovate@BU and the Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, an organization that highlights Asian-American artists and heritage. As an artist with an Asian-American background, the placement felt like home. It also gave her the chance to apply what she was learning in real time.
“There was a moment in the last week where we were having a team meeting at Pao, and they were discussing some of the frameworks we were learning about,” Megan recalls. “I could just jump into the conversation, and I even started explaining some of the concepts to them!” Her nonprofit knowledge, once unfamiliar, had become second nature.
“It was nice to know I had this foundation of information that I learned at Enlight… that I could bring to my real-life job and feel like I really belonged in the environment.”
In parallel, she began planning her lecture series that would bring business professionals into art environments across the city. “We don’t provide a lot of business opportunities [at CFA],” she notes. “I’m hoping to bring these voices into our spaces, so artists know what it looks like to build a sustainable creative career.”
Beyond the project work, Megan found something else in the Enlight Fellowship: a community.
“We all have this collective drive to do better and be better,” she adds.
That shared energy brought the Enlight scholars closer together, and helped fuel her own growth, validating the vision she brought to the program.
Through the Enlight Fellowship, Megan Kwan didn’t just deepen her understanding of social impact—she laid the groundwork for a citywide network of artists, equipped with both creative passion and entrepreneurial skill.
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