 All right. I think it is now a good time to get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in today for this event brought to you by new America and the public interest technology university network. If you're not familiar in the public interest technology university network which you might hear today referred to as pit UN is a partnership that unites colleges and universities committed to building the field of public interest technology and growing a new generation of civic minded technologists. Today, the network includes more than three dozen higher education institutions committed to developing curricula research agendas and experiential learning programs to develop graduates with skills and knowledge at the intersection of technology and policy. My name is Chris Kwong and I have the privilege of moderating this evening's conversation with four inspiring student leaders in the field of public interest technology. Today's topic is especially meaningful to me as I very recently was a student myself in the field of looking for opportunities and really didn't find any. And so that experience with me and some friends about three and a half years ago to found a nonprofit organization called coding it forward with the mission to inspire and empower students and young people with tech skills, much like ourselves at the time and our panelists today to consider social impact in public service. Today, we'll hear from four students and recent graduates from pit UN schools, Shreya Choudhury, Emily Fong, Demetria Mac, and James said, who will share their perspectives and pathways and public interest technology and suggestions that they have for their colleges and universities. As was mentioned at the bottom of your screen you should see buttons for the chat in the Q&A, and we encourage you to follow along and contribute to the conversation, ask questions of our speakers. And right now if you wanted to even introduce yourself to everyone else in the audience and to us would love to know where you're tuning in from and why you're interested in this event, and perhaps if you're affiliated with a college university feel free to use the chat to share there. We've got plenty of time for questions and answers and at which point will be joined by two other students or recent graduates, Emma Brennan and Leila Doty who will join us for that portion. But I guess just to get us started, maybe we can go down the virtual line Shreya, Emily, Demetria, and James in that order for a quick round of introductions. Maybe your name, your school, your year, your major, what you're studying, what you're doing now, and maybe a little bit about what public interest technology means to you. Shreya, we'll hand things off to you. Thanks, Chris. Hi, I'm Shreya, I usually her pronouns I am a rising junior at Olin College. And right now the summer I am participating in the Princeton Center for Information Technology and Policy summer fellowship so I'm placed at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief Officer and I'm working on the digital and design team, working to build digital services to support all New Yorkers. I'm an engineering with computing major at Olin. To me, public interest technology is a way to look at technology that recenters humans and people at the focus of everything that we do and posits that technology should always be created and used at the benefit of people and not to hurt them. Great, Emily. Hi everyone, my name is Emily Fong. I'm a recent graduate of New York University Scouts and School of Individualized Study. While there I created my own major called the Colonial Computing that focus on civil rights and justice as well as technology to have those things intersect. I now work at a startup based in downtown Brooklyn called Propel. We, our primary product helps low income users who are on food stamps or other government benefits, manage that windfall and approve more or invest in more wealth. And public interest technology to me is, you know, with the caveat that technology is a tool is the philosophy that we can use that tool to upend the social structures that cause injustice in our society. And she can do a lot more on scale impact as much as possible. Over to you, Demetria. Hi, my name is Demetria Mack. I am from Brooklyn, New York, I currently attend Howard University, and I am a computer science major and a rising sophomore. So I just wrote everything on so I won't forget. I am work this time I've been working with my professor to get a group of pit group implemented in our school. So we can be able to create a website that would be useful for all the students in our school and that kind of falls into why I'm interested in pit to begin with. And that is because it promotes inclusion. So a lot of people think technology in order to be involved in pit you need to solely be a techno, like a computer scientist or someone who's working in the technical field but I want to show that all a bunch of different work. Sorry, that was my dog, a bunch of different people can work together in order to create inclusiveness and create a better technological world for everyone, not just people who are working in the computer science field. Fantastic thanks so much and James us but not least. Hi, I'm James I'm a rising senior now at the University of Chicago studying political science and public policy with a minor in astrophysics. What else. Right now I'm like Shreya I'm working at the New York City Mayor's Office of the chief technology officer, where I'm working on the policy team, doing vaguely the same things that Shreya is but in a less technical capacity and a more sort of legal and policy momentation one, which has been really interesting. So what does sort of public interest technology mean to me, I would say, kind of just echoing what everyone else says. If I had to put it really simply it would just be using technologies a tool for the public good. In my mind, it's more centered around, at least the moment enabling governments to sort of use technology to do that but can certainly be expanded. Thank you so much. Thank you all for being here and being a part of this conversation. Obviously, all in Howard and why you and you Chicago are four of the over now 30 institutions that are part of the public interest technology university network and hello to everyone tuning in from wherever you might be. Thank you to other UN schools, folks who are interested in learning more about what new America and what I think most importantly, our students are doing. That's a space that I feel particularly passionate so I think, Demetria one thing that you mentioned and I heard in many other of the introductions as well is this focus of public interest technology being more than for folks who are studying computer and people who know how to code and building a big tent around what technology means and so I was wondering maybe if you could share since you being a rising sophomore you're the youngest one on on the panel. Share a little bit more about kind of what got you interested in kind of public interest technology and why that wasn't necessarily just kind of one particular field or department. So, um, I was really like as the world has been involving, especially in times now it's important that we use technology for a better purpose than what we're doing already. So, um, I shared the story when I first met with everyone on the panel. So, I began like getting interested in computer science because I watched a TED talk from a woman her name is Joe Bellamy. I'm sorry if I mispronounced her last name, but she was talking about how the biases and algorithms and how that negatively affects people. So I wanted to be able to do. I got interested in Pitt because being able to fix these algorithms and being able to move forward into a more inclusive technological. I think we may have lost. Wait, I'm sorry. I'm back. You're back. No. I'm so sorry about that. My everything just froze that it wasn't something on my end or. No worries. You were talking about joy. Yeah. Yeah. After I watched that TED talk and she started talking about the biases and algorithms and how that negatively affects African American people. I just started thinking about how can we use technology so it can be inclusive to everyone and not just a specific group of people and I feel like with Pitt. I think it's really important to promote that in like inclusiveness to show that if you work in fields such as public policy, you can have a direct influence on this that can go on to affect to positively affect a group of people, rather than the majority, which is white men. And I think we've seen a lot of that in recent discussion as well that that has come to the fore in terms of how technology perpetuates certain types of bias and oppression. There are a number of great readings and works that that I would recommend everyone check out. I think what what's really impressive to me is how public interest technology is not a department New America and the university network are not trying to just create a public interest technology department but building bridges across disciplines and Emily I think one thing that you mentioned is that you. You kind of looked at what and why you had and said hey, I don't necessarily see a home in any one department and maybe if you could just share a little bit more about what went into the colonial computing and maybe some of the ties to the conversation around public interest technology. Yeah, absolutely. To your point about kind of building bridges between disciplines. Gallatin is a school that really kind of specializes in that the focus at Gallatin is kind of individualized learning and that you build your own curriculum as a student. But when I came into school that space was very much a humanities performing arts kind of space. And that definitely was the right fit for me initially. I came into college with a really strong interest in justice and civil rights, but wasn't quite sure how to scale that in which direction to go. And so I ended up taking a couple of computer science courses that really had an interesting spin to them so specifically an angle on creativity and literacy and language. And I was like, wow, that is a really impactful and powerful tool for addressing a lot of the inequities that affect so many people. And so, I think, you know, the computer science major itself was really useful for that to understand how it actually worked, but I felt like I didn't necessarily have a great understanding of, or a foundation, let's say, for the broader inequities in our society. And if they existed, didn't know how they manifest necessarily. And so, humanity studies, specifically in post colonialism feminist studies and critical race theory really formed the background of that broader understanding and I was able to take what I understood and saw in the technology industry into these fields and realize like, here is an explicit problem of inequality, or oppression or algorithmic, sorry, algorithmic oppression, like to what Demetria had talked about. And here is how technology exacerbates or can help address this problem. And so traditional humanities studies provided like a really wonderful bridge for me to be able to enter technology in that way. I think one of the parallels that we're seeing is kind of finding a home on campus for the kind of intersection that you're really passionate about. And Trey, I know that's something that you've been doing a lot at Olin and would love for you to share with everyone, some of the work that you've done around building communities and creating opportunities for your peers and how at Olin, that has been a student driven endeavor and I think fitting for our conversation today about student perspectives and pathways. You didn't wait for an administrator, you didn't wait for maybe necessarily someone to say, okay, we're going to do public interest technology. You kind of just jumped in and helped start a grassroots movement and if you could maybe show a little bit more about that. Yeah, something that Emily said earlier really struck by talking about how public interest tech is a philosophy of how technology can be used to upend social structures and I think that that really connects to my conception of public interest tech and the really the reason that the organization that I helped create at Olin is student driven because I think fundamentally public interest tech is about empowering technologists and their responsibility and ability to serve the public interest and to help people. And basically when I came to Olin, I think I was actually at kind of the opposite places Emily, where I knew a lot about technology was interested in technology. And I like, sort of genuinely knew that I cared about social justice and care about civil rights, but I had no idea how to intersect the two. And I ended up basically kind of falling into public interest tech by connecting with one of my professors at heart Grave, who really wanted to create a space at Olin to engage students with public interest tech, and it's a long term so I connected with a few other students and just basically through our shared passion and wanting to find the space for ourselves that didn't exist yet. We ended up creating a space for other students so the group that we created is called pints. It's a community for public interest technologists, it's all about learning and growing as public interest technologists through authentic meaningful embedded experiences A couple of our capstone programs are a pro bono consulting clinic for nonprofits that are working to serve the public interest and an undergraduate summer fellowship that would embed Olin students in public interest organizations for the entire summer. So both of those experiences are fundamentally about giving students the chance to authentically practice as public interest technologists and gain the skills that they may gain in other places in the Olin curriculum but never connected as deeply within the framework of public interest tech as in pints. That's fantastic and I follow the work that point has done and really, I think the fact that is student driven, and it just speaks to so much of what potential there is for for conversations for public interest technology because I think one of the things that we've heard through our work in coding in Florida is a lot of students are interested in thinking about the public interest and interested in technology and too often they think that those have to be mutually exclusive they have to pick one or the other and so to break down that awareness gap and to see their peers. I know we have a lot of students tuning in so hopefully I think all of your stories are going to be really inspiring and showing people that hey they're not alone you're not weird to think that I want to use technology as a way to improve our communities and in the world that we live in and I think to the point back about interdisciplinary one question for you James before one that I'll post everyone, you come from more of kind of a policy background, less of a hard technologist and so what kind of from you Chicago like how was tech policy something that you had always been interested in or is that something that systems or something that you discovered on on campus that led you down this path and now you're working with the mayor, his office of the chief technology officer in New York, you share a little bit more about how you got to where you are. Yeah, I think the answer to that is sort of like mixed I would say to some degree I've always been interested in both technology and policy, sort of a separate entities, but I think one of the things that really linked that in my mind for me was a class that I took called AI for public policy at the university, where the philosophy of the class was not so much of learning how to actually like implement artificial intelligence systems machine learning systems etc. But how to actually like judge them and from sort of an abstracted standpoint taking one step back, learning like what my professor called the player skills I had to look at the notes again for. I, I came here today just to figure to be useful but the general idea is, as long as you know how to judge something and ask really useful questions and understand the system from a broad standpoint rather than a specific technical standpoint. You can kind of still get to a level where you have some understanding and but even more usefully inability to actually put them into practice and evaluate critically. I think that sort of approach from that class I've taken out a little bit. So, obviously, like you said I have a bit more of a policy background, but I've tried to. While I've definitely tried to gather more CS skills at the university and sort of outside. I would say I sort of come out with the employer mindset where I want to know, you know, I want to understand it but maybe even if I can't do every every little bit of it. Thanks for your question. Yeah, definitely. Thanks. Thanks so much. So I know we have a captive audience here many of whom are pit you and liaisons faculty staff administrators who are really, I think ready as the school year kicks off will be it in a fashion that I don't think anyone anticipated until very recently. So one question if you had a magic wand and you could suggest that your college or university or kind of the prototypical college or university did one thing to support students like you in public interest technology, what, what would that be. Sure, why don't you, you start off. So I think I'm going to cheat a little bit since this one thing might be actually quite big. I think probably the simplest way to describe it is that if I could imagine a dream world for public interest technology, it would be a world where public interest tech is legitimized in the way that every other field is. If you look at traditional computer science, for example, there's a pretty clear pathway when you enter college. You can say I'm going to declare a major in computer science. I know that I can go to my career counselors and say like I want to do an internship related to computer science, and they will have a list of options that you can explore and there will be opportunities for postgraduate education as well, like the journey that you have to take to go from wanting to be computer science to becoming a computer scientist is super clear. And I think that in my experiences I've kind of had to craft that experience for myself and it would be absolutely amazing. If that sort of thing existed for public interest tech, but also saying that like if I have a magic wand, I think I can be a little bit bolder. I would just legitimize public interest tech as a field like any other field, but I think what's special about public interest tech is the fact that it's so necessary as a field to exist because it's all about interacting with the real world and shaping the world to be a better place. So I think that in my mind, public interest tech would be not just a separate major, but woven into every other part of the curriculum that students go through as well so all students get to understand what public interest tech is. And in every single experience they have in public interest tech it's an embedded experience that engages with real partners and real people because in my opinion, people wouldn't actually learn public interest tech otherwise. It's just to dig in a little bit deeper. You mentioned kind of various things that drive legitimacy and so I'm going to constrain the power of your magic wand and say if you had to pick one thing, would it be classes, would it be an internship program, would it be career services, what do you think would be kind of the lowest hanging fruit that maybe a college or university could focus on? I think probably the lowest hanging fruit is career services. Since in my experience when I realized that I wanted to go into public interest tech, I definitely tried Googling public interest tech jobs. And there were sparse and very confusing results because I think that many careers do fall under the umbrella of public interest tech but they may not necessarily name themselves as such. So it became a lot more of an involved process of trying to understand like okay what are the causes that I want to contribute to? What are the organizations that are working in those causes? How do I find my way into those organizations that may have really high barriers of entry for an undergraduate student who is still learning and developing skills? So I think that if there can be additional support for that since that was a pretty intimidating process to go through alone, that would create a huge impact. Great. Dmitry? So what I think we should focus on mostly is the classes. When James mentioned how he had to take a class that was based on like having an understanding of technology, I think that would be a very good thing to have in order to make like a pit more known in schools, mostly because a lot of people like myself, you have to take classes according to your track and you have to graduate with a specific amount of classes, but most of these classes do not go around the don't give you a like morally holistic view of how you can implement the values that you learn in these fields into the real world. So having more classes that teach you about mostly for me specifically as being a computer scientist that teach me about the morals that you're supposed to have not only for a computer science and the things that you're supposed to follow within your profession, but how you can apply these morals into making sure that you're giving your being fair and making sure you're making programs that are available to everyone. So having classes that and also that having different classes also fees into like the interconnectedness that is like something that's heavily promoted through pit and showing that inclusiveness and showing that you just because you may be like a like on a pre law track for example doesn't mean you can't take classes in computer science because you never know how that can benefit you in the future. So just having these classes just so people can understand and see just because I'm not specifically a computer science major, I could contribute to contribute to this in the future. If I have an idea on how these processes works and vice versa for computer scientists having taking more of more classes that teach them about like morals and how they can make programs that are helpful for everyone not just them so. James or Emily magic wand wishes. Yeah, I would also say classes like sort of both of you guys. I just wanted to touch on something really quickly what Demetrius said I just wanted to clarify with the class. Part of the point actually was to talk about the sort of the pitfalls that technology can fall into as you kind of strive towards equity so very specifically actually like, you know what kinds of training sets are you using where's the data coming from things along the lines but on a more broad note. I was also struck by what Shreya said, and sort of how public interest technologies, a lot about like how technology interacts with the world and shapes and is also shaped by at the same time. I think that's a really current process and one of the things that I would bring in from this past zoom quarter, as I think we all call it is a class that I took, which was sort of a pop up class about coven 19 and government response was a very sort of in the moment kind of class and it was policy having not exactly relevant to this topic but I think that style of class is really interesting. The professors were really excellent at both like teaching us and creating sort of like a broader research project as we navigated through ourselves. I think there were a lot of really interesting just like broad research potentials and especially as we go into another quarter of this on knowing this I think any professors on on this call would be, it would be really useful I even like for a couple of weeks, you took like a couple of weeks and just did like a project with your class about something incredibly current, like walking through the research process, having some sort of end product at the end. I think that was really really interesting. And I think that kind of broadly reflects public interest technology. One thing that I wanted to say and actually mentioned this to my professor, a lot of people in my class we actually mentioned this to our professors, a possible final project. I know my professor she's on the line so hi. Just having us like we had to take a final as on most people have been doing it was like a written, but I think it would be important for us to actually create programs that not only are suited for computer scientists, but like, I guess that are not our relevance to computer science world like just creating programs that can go out to help that can connect with other fields such as public policy or even met like the medical field just having these projects that allow us to connect with other fields just so we can see just because we are a computer scientists we can also go into other fields and have and use our talents to make things to make great things happen in those fields to so Definitely, I think seeing the real world applications of the technology that is being built and having that be more than delivering food to your door five minutes faster or the next photo sharing app but James as you were saying maybe how technology has been used to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we're seeing great organizations like the United States digital response stand up in response to that and I think one of the through lines is experiential learning and it sounds like each of you had an experience where you saw an application into kind of the real world and you're not just building technology for technology sake, you said hey, this was really meaningful I'm kind of hooked, and I know me personally. That was also my entry point into public interest technology was I took a class at Harvard Kennedy School called Tech and innovation in government taught by Nick Sinai and we it was a field course where we actually build projects for real clients and you got to see the impact that that had so I think it sounds like there's a consensus here is like how do you get students to see the applications beyond kind of the end of the unit or the end of the midterm that that you'll take several weeks into the semester. So one thing that I think has been really interesting is the resources and kind of working with faculty, working to kind of explore these interests that you've had and maybe sure we can start with you in terms of finding you mentioned that you've joined with a faculty collaborator. How have you been able to, I guess inspire people to to this vision did you start with the students and I think there are a lot of students on the line who might be really interested in saying hey, this is something I'm really interested in like what what should I do next and I know you're working on a playbook of sorts that maybe you can give people a sneak peek. Yeah, so I think that the process for us at pint was a little bit unruly and complicated and definitely full of experiments, which is a great way to learn. I think that a few of my major takeaways was that we were incredibly fortunate to find faculty member who were willing to support us so early in the process like Earhart has continually acted as a champion for pint and not in that he is trying to determine what pint is and define it but rather than just trying to give us the mentorship and guidance and space that we need to run those experiments and try things out and see what works and see what doesn't work. In terms of reaching students, I think it was a kind of a two tiered approach. So first, so is the matter of creating the space that we knew that students wanted students at Olin have have been asking for direct experience, working ethically with technology for a long time now and it was just a matter of having access to that space early in their careers at Olin because there are capstones and courses that students can take later on but those are only for juniors or seniors. So we wanted to be really delivered about creating the space that would engage first years as well and sophomores because we know that that is an important part of creating a pipeline into public technology. I think the second tier was actually just hosting a ton of community engagement events to help others in the community, including staff and faculty learn about public interest texts we've run like probably over some large number of speaker events, engaging alumni and other professionals in the pit field, and hosting like a book clubs people can read books that are related public interest type. So I think a lot of the big problem with this because it's such an emerging field people may not really understand what it means public interest tech in itself is kind of an opaque term when you hear it. So a lot of our work has also been about demystifying the term and helping people see how they can connect to it. Certainly. I think one thing that that has come up a lot in recent years is the drive to embed a lot of ethics into technology into computer science courses and really curious to hear whether that's something that you've seen at your universities. Has it been well done have you seen have an increased focus of how technology, I think, had at one point this utopian vision that technology is a rising tide that lives on boats but we've seen time and time again that that's not the case. Has that been something that your universities have addressed and how, if so, how it sounds like our universities could be doing some more embedding of ethics. And I will I will throw a quick plug there are two great programs one is the responsible computer science challenge which is run out of the mozilla foundation, helping and providing funding and resources for for colleges and universities to do that and sharing examples where that has been done really effectively and I think one example that I will point to is the embedded ethics curriculum. That is a partnership between the computer science and the philosophy departments at Harvard University and they have actually embedded ethics into a wide range of computer science classes and not just kind of the traditional machine learning class where you'll hear about bias algorithms and input output of data. So I guess, maybe one or two more questions before we invite Emma and Laila to join us as well is beyond technology and beyond the computer science classrooms really curious to hear about what other skills that all of you think are really important for public interest technologists to develop. Yeah, that might be academic it might be professional and it might be a little bit full but for the students online who might be interested in saying hey, I want to be doing Emily what you're doing and supporting my own folks or I want to be working at the city level or I want to be working in an organization that is thinking about public interest technology what skills should they develop. Yeah, sure. I'm happy to. Emily, feel free. I know we haven't heard from you. No worries. I'm happy to jump in on this one. It's kind of like something that I've definitely been learning in the last year or so. I think the nature of public interest technology and James and I can probably speak to this in terms of the policy work is that it is very much interdisciplinary. I think coming from the technology side, there's not necessarily a huge emphasis on emphasis on building holistic skills as you're kind of proceeding through a very technical major for no one's fault of their own obviously. But in terms of like being able to communicate with non technical stakeholders like as a product manager you definitely have to you know there's some emphasis on put on being able to speak engineer fluently but can the engineer speak business can the engineer speak government. And so understanding like where you're being jargony how do you communicate and how do you build consensus has been really really important. I think it's a good idea to build off of that I think a lot of what it requires to build literacy in government and in business and other fields is to have an approach to technology where it's less about actually building the technologies I think that's kind of the easiest part of public interest in the tech, but more about engaging with all the questions that might surround that technology, like who is going to be hurt by this piece of technology who is going to be helped, where the systems it's going to interact with poor people that need to support this technology and existing and, and working the way that we want it to. And those are questions that are often not asked in technical classes like we aren't asked to think about the people. Really, so I think that speaking directly to faculty who are listening or teaching technical topics. I would encourage you to think about how you can introduce those questions into every single thing that your students do and empower them to think about those questions and realize that probably those questions are the answer to be more questions. But I think it's critical that public and technologists are comfortable with questions and navigating spaces that feel ambiguous. And I just definitely like that what what trail is saying, and certainly what Emily saying as well I think something that's really interesting to contrast between the place that I worked, or place that my entrance this past summer and working at New York City is the difference between private and public in, you know, who has to, who has to sign off and what the incentives are. I'm guessing Shreya is also probably for this, since I got some advice from someone in her office on this exact topic actually. But I think one of the one of the really interesting things to learn is the challenges of policy implementation, maybe I'm biased because as a public policy major but the number of stakeholders who need to sign off on something. And the incentives around the stakeholders to sign off is completely different between private and public. If you want to go into public interest technology. It would be incredibly useful to say the least to understand what change means in different organizations, whether it's the incentive for change or the incentive against change I suppose, and then kind of things around accountability as well in private versus public you're not accountable to anyone really in in private corporations but well that's not really true, but sort of. And, but I think in the public you're you're accountable to the public and you know seeing your name on a newspaper the next morning is really not everyone wants to avoid that I think a lot more than in private companies. So, yeah. So, I just wanted to add, I also think it's important like speaking to what Cheryl was saying about the teaching ethics in our classes, like I remember when I had to read my textbook that was assigned to me for my computer science class this semester. And there was a small section of ethics but they didn't talk about how these ethics go beyond the technological like implementation. And I think it's also important for pit to go into low income areas that are primarily minorities because we obviously know there is like a diversity deficit in many of these fields that we that pit like is that pit like acknowledges so I think it's important to get to like train these kids train like, especially black and brown students were early about pit and how they can. They have to offer to the to pay and how they can, and just, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to think like process everything that I'm saying, and just getting them interested in it and showing that you're working with the younger generation, and to, because which is who happened, like, live carry on the life hood of pit. So I think it's important to reach out, especially to minority students, because you get a different view and get a different group of people who get to contribute to this organization. Definitely, I think building broad coalitions and recognizing that technology as a tool has not been accessible to a lot of communities. Dmitry, like you mentioned black and brown communities and how public interest technology might be a vehicle for us to increase diversity and equity in the technology industry I think is one thing that we've seen and James to your point about understanding how it gets done in government I know that's something through coding it forward a lot of students that participate in our fellowship programs fine, is that the hard problems are not the technology problems. They're the people problems of process and the policy problems and I think one thing that I've seen from really successful public interest technologies who I admire is one kind of the ability to kind of cut through red tape and we like to call students bureaucracy hackers or and trade to your point about kind of building empathy for who's going to be using the technology and recognizing that technology is not neutral. And so I guess one last question before we welcome from me and I love to have a conversation since I think all four of you are in different points in your academic and professional trajectories is the idea of kind of what you hope to do. And so with the skills with kind of the backing and everything that you've done in the public interest technology space in terms of careers in terms of internships. What is kind of your dream of, like how you want to create impact. That's a big question so maybe Emily if I could throw you on the spot since I know you you've been out of school for maybe a year and a half now and you've explored internships and government you've explored what it's like to work in social impact and in public interest a little bit outside. Any reflections on kind of public interest careers. I'm a full disclosure. I'm a graduate of Chris's program. And so Chris's program in particular really kind of set its fellows up for success and PIT. We got to learn a lot about what people in the field are already doing. But I think the unfortunate thing is that there's definitely still a gap for people who graduate from college and immediately want to enter the field. So that's kind of hard to find your first opportunity. So that's kind of part of where like to try to find earlier like the community and career building are really really valuable tools that if a university has someone can take advantage of. But once I mean I feel like when I've gotten into public interest technology propellers to a for profit but we definitely work alongside government a lot of the ways. And I think it is a really unique and challenging space in part because you are solving for so many use cases that just do not exist for kind of traditional Silicon Valley companies. The emphasis on inclusivity on economic diversity at least in our work is really really important because you wouldn't be able to be effective or do what you do or be sensitive to the needs of your users without it. And so I think in terms of like next steps and going forward. The work in like the benefit space has been really inspiring to me. Because in part I think it is a microcosm of a number of huge problems politicization, complex systems, not a ton of technical support in those complex systems are all kind of finding their nexus in this area of work. Yeah, Demetria. I think it would also be important for obviously I still have a little while to go before I graduate, but I think it would also be important for the recent graduates to come back to their school and speak to the students about how it has affected them and how to change them because I know me it would be very inspiring from someone who has just graduated, how it has like affected them and how they still want to work with it outside after graduation. So I think that would be something important to do because it's one thing for your professors to tell you that, but to actually hear from your peers. I think that would be more like influential and want to drive people who are freshmen and sophomores to become interested in paying hopefully be working to that till they graduate as well. Perfect. Well, I think now is a great time to transition. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions we're really excited to dive into many of the things that you are curious about and I think before we do that would love to welcome. Brandon and Layla Doty are two other participants to join us on this virtual stage that was incredibly well timed. Fantastic. But I'm on Layla I was hoping maybe that the two of you could also introduce yourselves to the folks who are tuned in. I think very similarly your school, your major and maybe what you've been up to in kind of a public interest technology space. Emma, let's start with you. Yeah, so hi everyone, my name is Emma. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 2019 studying design for environments. And that's kind of about bridging and understanding how to make technology in both digital and physical spaces. And now I'm currently working at the Census Open Innovation Labs, which is nested within the Census Bureau, and we work to kind of bridge the gap between community government and technology. Hi everyone, my name is Layla. I'm a rising senior at Stanford majoring in public policy with the concentration in science and technology policy, and also doing a minor in computer science. And I've always been really drawn to public service and policy, and I became really interested in technology policy about a year ago, specifically the regulation of AI, and this past year I've been familiarizing myself with the p it space as it exists, or is beginning to exist on Stanford's campus, and and also as it exists within government industry. And this summer I'm doing an internship part of the same program as James and Shreya working on tech policy at the New York City Mayor's Technology Office so I'm really excited to join the discussion. And I will do my best to answer questions that the audience may have with other panelists. Yeah, definitely. There's a question that I think would love to start with Emma you and Layla about the skills that you've used from in your internships and in kind of Emma now in your case your career and why you had went through the same program that Emily did through coding forward, did a fantastic job. Curious about the skills that you and Layla in the CTO's office have used and whether or not you feel like you were properly prepared kind of given your coursework to do public interest technology work. Was there anything that you wish you had known going in that maybe your school could have prepared you for Yeah, I think I was very fortunate that a lot of my design program at Cardi B Mellon focused on understanding complex problems and systems and I think, although designing as a huge part of that and like the medium of how you actually implement these large scale changes because that's to me that was the biggest problem going into government and really trying to understand and break down like who are the people involved, what are everyone's motivations, trying to build an understanding of that and again people have mentioned it before but a lot of the technology is more of your means, rather than the ends of the problem and so if you really understand the context that you're working in and the policies involved, and you can actually implement solutions that have scalable change. I think I'll talk about this later but I think a really big gap in government right now is implementing technology but not implementing it for longevity. Sometimes like we'll build technology and different solutions but they're only temporary. And so, I would really advise people to understand and think about how can you incrementally make technology that's able to adapt and learn with the people using the systems level change and longevity and thinking about that Laila, how about you. Yeah, so I'll kind of approach this question talking about a specific class that I took at Stanford that I think did a really great job of weaving together the interdisciplinary aspects of PIT and which has allowed me to approach the issues that have come up in the NYC CTO's office from like an ethical angle, policy angle and also technical angles. So this particular course which I think is a good model for other administrators and faculty who are interested in creating PIT classes. So this course featured three faculty, one was a political scientist coming from a policy background, one was a CS professor and one was a philosopher by discipline. And so, throughout this course we focused on a lot of different issues like automated decision making, generalized AI, privacy issues, etc. And each of the units we attacked from these three different perspectives which allowed us to really see the way that people in different disciplines approach problems. But also, it gave us the skills to be bridge builders between these these professions or these disciplines in academia which tend to be siloed off which I think is really powerful. And I think that's honestly the future of PIT is giving students the skills to bridge builders between all these disciplines and to attack these issues in these ways. I think that's something that we're seeing a lot of is that you need to be interdisciplinary because public interest technology by definition is and so how can faculty teach, co-teach classes across different departments. How can they encourage their students to work on something that might be beyond the pale of one traditional department but saying, hey, this is really impactful. And so another question from the audience is, you are probably all on campuses where the norm or the tried and true path for students who are interested in technology is not to say, hey, let me go work for the mayor of New York or let me go work for the United States Census Bureau, but thinking about what is the tech startup that is on campus this week or what is the big tech company that I might want to work for. And so if you had to kind of convince your friends or your peers who are technologists in one way shape or form to kind of understand the importance of public interest technology or to convince them to be interested. What would you say, or how would you do that? Open that up. I was fortunate to be around a lot of people who had kind of a really strong justice oriented compass, but I will say I think that general awareness of the impact of technology has grown a lot. But even since before I left school, we saw this with protests on campuses for Palantir recruiting, we saw this with a lot of technology companies refusing or employees refusing to say that they are going to work on projects that had negative impact or human rights impacts. And so I think these broader conversations are definitely making their way to campuses in a way that maybe wasn't happening before. And in terms of actually trying to convince somebody that this was important, I would definitely try and tie like macro trends to your micro experiences. What does it mean for you to intern at a company that takes really lucrative, but maybe not ethical contracts is the work that you're going to be doing even as an intern or as an employee going to be affecting the world in an adverse way. I think most people care about that kind of issue and of course to be sensitive about different economic situations. Not everybody necessarily has the privilege to say yes or no. And so being able to point out like these opportunities exists, they're valuable and they're not necessarily at odds or at will put you at a disadvantage in technology are really important in terms of spelling out what it looks like, like personally and individually to a person. Anyone else. Um, I also think it's important like, um, it's important like Emily was saying, for I think we should specifically target the professors when it comes to this because a lot of my professors and a lot of people who are in College of Engineering which is the college that I am in every time when it comes to Lyft or Uber comes to campus. They tell everyone they send out mass emails but they should do the same when companies who aren't primarily tech grace come to campus to show them how that how technology can be implemented and in various fields and by just promoting Lyft, Uber, Amazon, Google it just creates this narrative that we're supposed to say within these big companies and not branch out so like the mayor's office branch out to working and giving our help to medical fields where needed right now, especially in the pandemic. So I think it's very important for our schools and our teachers is to promote and talk to our students about rural world things that are going on and how our talents in computer science can be implemented in these different fields. And also just overall mentioning to people that because I know a lot of people, this may sound terrible but they go into tech not technology field just for payout and telling them it's not just about the actual money that you're getting but the way that you're contributing to your community and how you can bring your knowledge back and help your communities that you may come from. So I think it's just important to teaching people, like just pushing ethics and teaching them. It's not just solely about yourself, especially if technology is an evolving field and it's very important in different aspects of life. Yeah, I think mentorship, that's a really great point to me Tria and I think mentorship has a really big piece of that. Being able to like record stories and create like alumni networks of people that have gone through that process and have gone through the experiences of what it's like to work in public interest technology and know the challenges with it but also the opportunities. A lot of the times you have a big tech companies creating really strong networks so students connect with them and learn about their experiences and look up to them and I think if you have that kind of channel through public interest technology there's a better way to actually bring people and teach them about what it's actually like to work in government. I know for myself, I never realized how much agency you have, even though of course you're facing a lot of really different challenges than you would at a private company, because a lot of my own work, I'm like more of a specialist and so I'm able to kind of have a lot of control over projects and put in a lot of input because there's not as much work that's been done with technology and design and so because there's so much opportunity to create new work that hasn't been there before, you do have a lot of control over the work that you do. Yeah, kind of just to piggyback off of that. I think it's been really important for those networks to exist post-grad but I think it's even more important for them to exist while you're on campus and that has been definitely a huge thing that I and the other organizers have spent a lot of time putting in and I think one of my biggest learnings is that, yes, a lot of students really care about this, but they don't have the methods or processes to figure out how their work as technologists can actually help people. And one thing that has been really impactful and successful at point has been just creating a space where we can have conversations and learn together about the values around technology and understand our personal values. I think it's very important to remember that students entering college are still students still growing like I definitely have learned and developed a lot in terms of my personal values and having space where I can think about my values in intersection with my work as a technologist has been incredibly beneficial because it's not something that is really present in many curricula and I think that it's really important that we disrupt the narrative that technology is not tied to values and instead introduce values explicitly and give students frameworks for understanding their values. I think share everything you just said was perfect and that's exactly like what I've been thinking, and I think this also starts at just the professors and like professors and like the chairs of like the colleges that we're in. I think they just need to sit down with each other and talk about how can we have our different majors and different professors work together with one another. In order to make a community that's more inclusive for all their students and promotes this. Yeah, definitely I think to a couple of points in the community of like minded peers. And then Dimitri's point about how can I find opportunities in public interest technology because they often are a little bit harder. I think someone mentioned they were just googling for opportunities and didn't necessarily find them and so I'm just going to put a quick plug for for two things that coding it forward does. And hopefully that are of value for young people and students especially is we send out a bi weekly jobs and internships newsletter specifically focused on entry level roles in public interest technology and social impact. If you're interested in subscribing to that, we post internships and kind of entry level jobs would recommend kind of logging on through and subscribing on our website which is coding it forward.com. And very similarly we also foster kind of a community of like minded peers we have a Facebook group and encourage people to show what they're doing called coding it forward and so I think those are two ways that we've seen young people and tried to respond to some of the same opportunities and awareness that we have seen in terms of I think James there is a question for you you were talking about earlier about how change works differently in the public sector and in the private sector and could you maybe just share a little bit more about that and what your experiences this summer have taught you maybe as you compare to a prior internship or kind of an academic sense of just reflecting on what changes and how young people can go about driving that. Sure. Um, so do whoever asked this take this with a little bit of a grain of salt. I come at this from a policy and sort of a political science mind standpoint. So you're mileage may vary. But I think the So, and also certainly where you work I think it varies. But I will say I think a lot of change in the private sector is I feel a little bad because I am using very much using material that I had a just conversation with from the person from our office. So you should probably get the credit from this but I think a lot of change in the private sector comes from the sort of motivation to make money or impact or something along those lines whatever you want to call it utility. And so what you're motivated by in startups especially is the the ability to like really move fast and so people who don't move fast are sort of judged. So everyone wants to move really fast so that don't get judged and so they make money or impact or whatever. I think in government is the opposite. Everyone from from an institutional level and there are a lot of incentives which slow things down. I think people want to slow things down as well. There are lots of layers above you and so every layer above you wants to basically make sure that they're not going to be in the paper. I know I keep saying that. But that means that in a nutshell essentially the 20 people above you in in a line going down to you are all going to be trying to put the brakes on whatever you're doing. And the more government there is the more that will happen. So the harder it is for you to change it I'm sure the people who actually work in and around government on a daily basis can probably shed more light on that but that's really what I was getting at. I will say also that doesn't mean that bureaucracy in government is inherently a bad thing. It's just a different institutional and incentive structure. And the more that people know about that the easier it is to make change. Yeah, maybe Emma if I could have you react to that a little bit you've been working in government for for a little while now and I know the team that you're in kind of operates a little bit untraditionally, but just reflect on kind of how making change in government what that looks like and I think if you could also just talk about there's another question about the types of design projects that you've worked on. I think design is a really important part of kind of the big tent that is technology that doesn't get talked about as much unfortunately so maybe if you could just share a little bit about that as well. Yeah, I think James what you were mentioning was really interesting about the speed in which government works versus private industry. And I think I'm just kind of reflecting on my past year working with the senses of innovation labs and we kind of act almost like a more fast paced environment within government. And I think it's an interesting balance because you're able to kind of make problem. Make products and test things quickly, while also acknowledging that it takes time to make large incremental change. And I think embracing both of those philosophies is really helpful because by working quickly you're able you're not afraid to make mistakes and you kind of combat the like risk averse problems of government where people are kind of afraid to take risks and and do big things but at the same time, working at a slightly slower pace also allows you to really process and reflect on what you're kind of impacted has and that will be my critique of private industry where again if you're not thinking about the values of your company and what are the biases and what you're making and really developing time to test and understand who your users are then again there's a lot of limitations with that so I think trying to find a balance between both is really powerful speeding up and slowing down and reflecting. And I guess that kind of I can talk a little bit about some of the work I've done but something I think is a bit relevant is we've done a lot of work with how do we kind of bring human centered design thinking into the Census Bureau. And so we developed a program to bring in different managers within government teaching them different human sense design principles actually like bring through like the process with them so we have them join up in teams and address like what are the challenges they're facing in the Census Bureau and then actually like create and design solutions and approaches to these different challenges and I think that was a really powerful teaching moment for me just to understand again change kind of happens from every level and you know if you have leadership that has really big ideas and wants to change and you have new people coming in a lot of the times the problem can be the middle where people that have been around for a really long time really know the complex structure of the government they're working in but also don't have a lot of agency because they've been around for so long so to me that was a really powerful project to understand what are their motivations and limitations to then figure out how can we kind of make them feel like they have agency again and activate change from that level so again like my design work has varied a lot whether like building products with technology or like trying to build in different systems to help people change but I think reflecting on the pace that we're working and how much you're bringing in and thinking about who your stakeholders are who your users are and what their context is is very important Yeah Emily Also totally okay if we want to move on to a different topic because we've talked about this a bit but I think just to offer kind of a different perspective as we're talking about government versus private industry I think the points that Emma and James were speaking to are really important and things that students should be primed and ready to consider There are definitely concerns that I had going into private industry that we weren't going to be listening to our users that that we are changed couldn't scale or impact couldn't scale and I think I've generally found that to be untrue I think when we think of Silicon Valley we think of the Ubers and the Facebooks and the companies that really don't care or not don't care but really prioritize growth over user impact and impact in general on society but I think at least like in private industry you also get the opportunity to learn a lot more when our interactions with government we've certainly seen a lot of stakeholders who have run a program for 20 years but have never actually tried to apply for that program to Emma's credit I think it's great that she's able to try and you know bring that thinking of like you should iterate you should try things to government but being in private industry and working alongside government has actually given us a lot of opportunities to sort of slide in and be like hey we're an outside stakeholder we've noticed this affects your users here's a bunch of nonprofits that we work with that also address this problem like how can we get you to talk and so ultimately that's mostly just to say that it really kind of depends on where you go and what your values are and how they align with where you work and that can also be the same in government whether or not the agency that you work for is aligned with your values that's obviously a very complicated topic right now definitely thank you all for for touching on that I think another question and a theme that I'm seeing in the responses that we're getting from folks who are tuned in is thinking about this particular current moment that we're in in terms of protests around police brutality and racism the Black Lives Matter movement the coronavirus pandemic scandals in the tech industry and on and on and on and I think one thing that has come up is that as young people a lot of these movements are field by young people and so I guess a two-part question that I'll put up there is kind of in this particular moment one of the guests is saying they feel like they want to respond to the inequities in our systems by just walking away from both and asking kind of where you find hope and where you see hope in the systems that you're operating in and in the context of public interest technology perhaps and then also thinking about how do you see technology promoting social justice and that kind of lens to to public interest technology yeah James really briefly and taken with the grain of salt because of my political science background and also my privilege in society but I do find that in government a lot of people who are in the systems are very much trying to change systems so I think number one that should give everyone hope now admittedly it is the city of New York so it people who work there tend to think a certain way but even within I think the offices people are constantly trying to push for change that they believe in so I think that's useful but I also do want to point out that I think for at least from from my standpoint all changes political so when you think about government that people who are in the leadership and government are ultimately going to point the direction that the big machine of government is going government is going and people inside can can sort of go in their own way but if you think about it in a purely like vector idea like leadership is gonna be pointing you in one direction and you can maybe go up or down or like this side a little bit but you can't actively completely resist it because they have the power you don't yeah awesome we'll go Laila and then Traya yeah I'm just to touch on the first question I think that was asked about where we draw inspiration from this might sound like a little cheesy but honestly I draw inspiration from the community and people like the members that we have on the panel today it's really really inspiring to see other like-minded people who are passionate about issues of equity and justice at the intersection of tech and policy so that in itself is really really invigorating the second half of the question is harder to answer I believe it was about how we can address how we can achieve social justice or work towards it through tech and that's hard because a lot of the tech that we have now has exacerbated or the very least perpetuated existing inequities in society so I think at the very least it starts with reevaluating the structure that we have within our technologies and decolonizing them and rooting out the racist structures that have been embedded into into all of our technology and it's extremely important not only because of the time we're in but because technology is so pervasive in all aspects in all sectors of our economy in all sectors and all aspects of our lives so yeah Shaya and then Demetria will hit chairman as well yeah this is a really hard question for me to think about since I think I've become so aware of the ways that technology can hurt people that I might have actually lost sight of whether technology actually can help people if created with the right values and philosophies and I've been really really fortunate and grateful to have had the opportunity to actually do that this summer at the New York City Mayor's Office of the Chief of Technology officer and I think the the biggest things that I've learned is actually that technology can as Emily said earlier up and social structures that create inequities I think it's all about creating access rather and I think systems like typically private technology tends to borrow a lot of people from access systems that they actually need to help too and that's the power of government since the ideally government is supposed to create access so government using technology to actually help people just magnifies that potential to create access and there's like a couple examples from the New York City office in particular like for example the New York City office is making huge strides in trying to make broadband a universal human right which is important all the time but especially important in the middle of a pandemic and on the digital and design team we're making huge strides to try to create infrastructure so that content can be translated easily so that we can get to a point where translation isn't an afterthought and people are not barred from government services just because they don't speak English but in fact translation is just the standard and it's as easy as writing English content so I think that there is actual real power in using technology if it is interfacing with governmental systems and I think that we like everyone that's on this panel we are to start into making sure that technology is used for good rather than malicious purposes because we can go into our community we can go into our community we can teach people we can teach our peers we can teach the students that we went to school about what we know about the ethics that we carry and how we carry that into the fields that we work in within pit and just teach them and just relaying information from one person to another and I think that will be really important because it's one thing for us to know how we can help but also sharing that information with others because we want everybody to be a part of this community where we're working for the better of humanity rather than just for to make to expansion just to make money. Yeah let's see I want to be mindful of time and we'll probably try to get in one or two more questions I think they're really recognizing the audience and the goal of the conversation provide kind of student pathways and inspirations and perspectives on your own journeys and I guess the question that has come in a lot is going back to that that magic one question of kind of what would you recommend colleges and universities who recognize the importance but don't know how to go forth maybe Emma and Layla we could start with you and hear what suggestions that you have for your schools or for schools in general and I think we can we can see what what comes up. Yeah I think I mentioned this before but I think a really important piece of this is mentorship being able to see people and acting the kind of goals and visions that some students might have is really powerful and being able to see those people and understand how they got to that pathway and being able to work with them is really really important and I think that's why I really was impacted by the the civic digital fellowship that Chris runs because that was almost like a created community where I could meet with fellow peers and talk about technology and ethics and engage in different conversations and learn about what they're understanding and figuring out because I did come from a design background and I didn't have as much experience with technology in the public sector and so coming into that there was a lot of information that I didn't know or understand like how do you learn about policy where do you even start what are the different conversations and things that people are debating right now so being able to get access to a community like that is really powerful and can help continue that energy and create and build people together. Yeah just to build off of that I know this was a point that was brought up earlier but something I think is really pressing is that I personally haven't seen much action on is carving out pathways into public interest tech careers for undergraduates. I've seen some internships and fellowships for graduate students at certain companies and organizations but especially as a rising senior who wants to go into tech policy what I feel is really missing are clear examples of both immediate so like entry-level jobs and near future maybe mid-level career prospects and I think it's a problem that the next job the next steps into my career are unclear because that can certainly deter other students from pursuing this pathway but I think this is a particular problem for people who are coming from policy and social science backgrounds because you know not only from my personal perspective but we need a diversity of people in public interest tech it's been a recurring theme during this discussion and by diverse I mean we need across all dimensions of diversity particularly in academic disciplines and so if we don't have a support for students from all backgrounds who want to come into this space then I think it's going to be a lot harder for people to find their way into public interest tech so so that would be that would be my point yeah I think seeing that really it's 2020 now if not already but in probably the next five years one of things that I keep reflecting on is every organization will probably be a tech organization in one way shape or form and I think a place where colleges and universities is there's not there's not going to be no shortage of demand for students who are interested in the space whether it's not proper organizations government agencies at the local state federal levels and so I think one thing that I've seen be really valuable is kind of the provision of funding because students oftentimes have organizations have connections that they want but as has been brought up is sometimes the resources aren't there and I think the COVID pandemic has hit a lot of organizations that are working where the rubber meets the road particularly hard and so supporting students and kind of putting money where your mouth is and offering students an opportunity to to spend the summer and get hooked I think Emma and Emily at least through the fellowship I think having that one experience hopefully kind of open your eyes to the world of the possible let's see what other questions they might have in terms of I guess thinking about we've been talking a lot about building bridges between departments how do you think that you all and and also as a public interest technology movement can build bridges to people who don't necessarily identify as technologists how how can we kind of bring them into this movement and how can on the flip side any advice for people who are trying to navigate kind of public interest technology without much of a background to meet you I think you might be muted no I just said that that was an interesting question I was trying to think about I guess really quickly just an observation that I've had in the summer I don't know if I can really help with that question but at the start through the the program that I'm Shreya and Laila and Irene we had a couple of or not couple we actually had quite a few guest speakers so shout out to the to the sort of hit UN team for putting that together it was really interesting but what really like I what I really appreciate was the diversity of backgrounds that people had coming into this field like we talked to like DA's and assistant attorney generals we talked to professors we talked people have like a specific CS background and I think I didn't really appreciate that even like knowing enough about the field to get into it I did not fully grasp the like various dimensions that you could be you know you can be a lawyer you can be vaguely affiliated you could do like policy enforcement you could be coding in government you could be serving between you know government and programmers various things like that I think that's that's something to really emphasize you can there are so many positions that you would not think of they might be sort of hard to get into but everyone has kind of fallen into them from many many different career paths in many different skill sets so kind of internalizing that I think in in sort of the communities would be really useful or at least in yourself as a viewer yeah I think a lot of people get intimidated when they hear of when they hear of it because they're so much like they're primarily focused on the technology aspect that's in the acronym so I think it's just important for us to like to push the like especially for professors you just push the idea that Pitt is not only about technology and whatever you have to offer that could be beneficial to the organization is welcomed with is welcomed and received with open arms I think for a conversation today that has focused a lot on building bridges between disciplines and departments on the university campus recognizing that as a public interest technology movement we have a lot of work in building bridges and growing our movement to include and I think James to your point and Dimitri is that is probably my favorite question to ask people in public interest technologies how did you get to where you are because there is not one kind of tried and true path and I think those unique perspectives really bring a lot and add so much value in terms of representing at the end of the day public interest technology represents kind of everyone in this country and so we need perspectives that are as diverse as that can be so I just wanted to kind of wrap up thank all of our panelists here today for spending some time and sharing their perspectives I think for universities and Emily you're talking about human centered design students are the ultimate users of a university and so really encourage the faculty of the staff on the call to engage the wonderful students that you have on your campus who are having similar conversations and the same passions and interests that all of our students here today have as well and really engaging them in co-creation about how can we provide opportunities and resources I know there are many many resources that were mentioned in the chat and rest assured we will be sending out a summary email that will highlight a number of resources that were mentioned by our panelists by folks in the audience and so as well if any of the panelists were will be willing to share their contact information or how to learn more about the work that they're doing that will all be included in the follow-up email and just two things I think that I will mention is one I think the unique moment of the coronavirus and the fall semester being particularly uncertain and so I just wanted to mention that the organization that I help lead coding it forward just launched this week the fall cycle of our flagship initiative which is the Civic Digital Fellowship it's a program that both Emily and Emma participated in but we bring software engineers data scientists product managers and designers to work on high-impact projects with federal agencies so I think if you're a student and you're looking for a real tactical and tangible opportunity this fall to create impact and serve everyday Americans would definitely recommend looking at that as an opportunity there's so many others on campus more locally that we will share as well but thank you everyone for tuning in today I took so much away from our conversation and I hope you did as well we hope to see you at a future event but until then good night and be well