On Tuesday, March 31, Macalester hosted its first-ever AI Magic Night in the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom, an event organized by Ride the Next Wave, a local AI “unconsulting” company. The event’s goal was to showcase the ways people are beginning to integrate AI into software and to give Macalester students a chance to network with other people interested in using AI, as well as industry experts.
One of the most important people in planning AI Magic Night was Macalester student and Ride the Next Wave Business Development Leader Laurice Jimu ’27, who is passionate about making AI accessible to international students.
“The idea was to create an opportunity for people to network, and hopefully international students to be a part of those people who are networking, [so they can] hopefully meet people who can end up giving them a job,” Jimu said.
Ride the Next Wave sponsored the event, which was its fourth AI Magic Night it has organized since its founding in 2024 and its first at a college campus. The event showcased twelve demonstrations of AI use in a variety of apps and websites from Macalester and non-Macalester developers, ranging from a networking app, to a solar panel monitoring system, to educational support software.
Ride the Next Wave Managing Partner Cihan Behlivan spoke about his love for organizing events, especially in the setting of a college campus.
“I love throwing parties. When I engage with college [life], I get very productive,” Behlivan said. “It reminds me of my 20s, throwing parties in my college and so I will love doing that. So it works.”
Especially meaningful to Behlivan was showing off programs like one developed by Kudzai Dhewa ’26. Dhewa crafted a networking app in partnership with his friend Vinlaw Mudewhe, a senior at Case Western University.
“We’re both passionate about using technology to solve everyday problems, right? [Mudewhe] had gone to some big conference in Austin, Texas. It was a huge conference where they have tens of thousands of people show up,” Dhewa said. “It’s very hard for you to sift through everybody and have conversations. So he was just thinking of how overwhelmed he was, and [he was] like, ‘We need a tool.’”
Once Dhewa and Mudewhe had developed an app to serve that exact purpose in part using AI, they reached out to Behlivan as a potential partner at Beta MN, a tech startup incubator.
“He told me I’m no longer with Beta, but I’m running this organization called Ride the Next Wave, and we’re actually going to have an event at Macalester — you want to put through and demo what you’re working on?” Dhewa recalled.
Behlivan also invited several organizations to the event to connect with students, including MN Women in AI, an organization dedicated to integrating more gender diversity into the AI sphere.
“I started MN Women in AI this summer, we’re still the newbies on the block.” Founder and CEO of MN Women in AI, Caroline Holden, said. “And so [Cihan] just asked, ‘hey, do you want to table out our event?’ “And I said, amazing. Let’s go.”
Holden felt it was important that MN Women AI was part of the event because of the disparities that exist between men’s and women’s use of AI.
“There are a lot of different studies that show that women are adopting AI at 25 percent the rate of men,” Holden said. “There’s a major gap in adoption, where many, many, many women are not learning how to use these tools. What happens is, when you continue to perpetuate the narrative that women are continuing to not adopt all of these tools … it leads to more women believing that these tools are not for them. … They don’t realize that the whole world has changed.”
The world has not changed entirely for the better, though. AI has social concerns that run deep, with the enormous amount of freshwater used, massive electrical costs and problems with data privacy, to name a few. While Jimu believes the concerns are legitimate, he argues there are effective ways of dealing with the problems of AI.
“You can hold off as much as you can, but by the time you actually end up deciding to adopt it, the front runners have already created these systems that keep on enforcing these terrible things, and you didn’t have a say on it because you weren’t involved in it in the first place,” Jimu said. “The answer is, at the end of the day, we need someone to do something about it, and not doing something about it, I don’t think is a good answer.”
Holden is of a similar opinion. “So many people are so concerned about the negatives and haven’t realized what the opportunities are out there,” Holden said. “If anybody’s scared, you’re allowed to hate the tech bros in the Bay Area, [but] also learn how to stay ahead and figure out what tools you want to use that fit your belief system.”
