Choreographing Her Own Path: from Dance to AI Research and Finding the Right Fit at GS

“The more diverse backgrounds a team has the better that they're able to solve an issue.”

Iris Tang ’26GS doesn’t just believe this—she lives it. Like many of her fellow GS’ers, she brings a multifaceted background to the table, blending discipline and resilience from years of intense dance training with the real-world perspective and independence that comes with following a nontraditional academic path.

Fresh off a six-week summer internship in Lisbon, Portugal, Tang worked at Boyden, a boutique consulting firm, where she and her team researched the impact of artificial intelligence on leadership development. Tang’s unique background proved to be more than a creative asset, not only in collaborating with her team members, but in the research process as well. 

“Some people on the team were very analytically minded, and then I was able to bring a more holistic sort of understanding,” Tang said of the discipline and resilience gained from her dance training that she brought to the table. It helped bridge some knowledge gaps and strengthen the inner workings of her team “because nothing happens in a vacuum...it's actually very helpful to have different perspectives come in.”

Tasked with envisioning three distinct future scenarios of how AI might reshape leadership development and the corporate landscape, Tang and her teammates tapped into both their research-driven academic training and creative thinking for a multi-angled approach. Their research led to crafting a narrative that explored the potential positive, negative, and in-between outcomes—and co-authoring a soon-to-be published strategic foresight report.

Finding her way to GS was less of a straight path and more a series of twists and turns, each bringing her closer to an academic home that, as Tang likened to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, felt “just right.”

Growing up as a competitive rhythmic gymnast (and well-versed in the world of physical therapy), she had a strong interest in pursuing life sciences, potentially on a pre-med track. She enrolled at Kenyon College to study neuroscience, but the campus environment wasn’t the right fit for her. “It was really remote, and I was questioning what I wanted to do with my life—whether these were things that I wanted for myself, or that my parents wanted for me,” she said.

She moved home to San Diego and went back to her dance roots, choreographing and performing a special solo routine for kids at the renowned San Diego Zoo. The confidence she gained through that experience led her to pursue dance even further at New York City’s Broadway Dance Center and Marymount Manhattan College. But still, the fit wasn't quite right. “I wasn't utilizing all of my talents in the ways that I want to use them,” Tang recalled.

Then, she discovered GS—and from the get-go, the fit was just right. Upon transferring to Columbia, Tang dove into studying cognitive science, her sights set toward a career in management consulting. “Management consulting is like professional problem solving—diagnosing an issue, and then coming up with a solution for it,” she said.

Her interdisciplinary cognitive science major bridges the diverse perspectives she encountered during her internship with the rigor and independence shaped by years in a dance studio. With a mix of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science, her studies align seamlessly with her academic and career goals as she heads into her final year at Columbia, including one exciting development: she’s helping relaunch the 180 Degrees Consulting chapter, creating more opportunities for students to gain hands-on experience in the field with nonprofits across New York City. “The process of relaunching has been a lot, but I'm excited to talk to a new group of students about it,” she said.

Tang’s journey proves what she’s known all along: when different perspectives and backgrounds meet, problems can become possibilities and lead to stronger, more innovative solutions. And sometimes, it takes following a winding path to find just the right fit.