 Thank you so much for joining us today. Whether you're a student, a career counselor, a faculty member, if you work in tech or nonprofits or government, or anyone else I haven't named yet, we're glad you're here. Public interest technology is by definition a big tent and calls for lots of collaboration and relationship building so we are happy to see the variety of folks here. The reasons for this conversation are twofold. First, Pitt is a relatively new exploratory field. It has several antecedent fields like science, technology and society, and public interest law. And it comprises many other fields from software engineering and data science to social work, public policy and movement building. There are also many folks doing similar work who simply don't call what they do Pitt, they might call it civic tech or tech for good. Pitt is a new framework for a lot of existing and frankly emerging work. So it follows that there simply aren't a lot of job titles or career pathways that are explicitly identified with public interest tech yet. The university network that supports new research and training programs in higher ed. Our ultimate goal is to facilitate the transfer of Pitt expertise and and skills from academia into the working world, be it nonprofits, government or in the private sector. And this challenge of building career pathways is core to our work at Pitt UN. We currently have an open request for proposal for Pitt UN members with grants of up to $20,000 to build career fairs on their campuses, potentially with some of you as their partners. The due date is coming up in two weeks so we're hoping that today's session will give those of you from the network, considering the RFP some inspiration and practical tools to go for it. You can learn more about that opportunity on our website pitcases.org and we encourage you to reach out directly to us with any questions you have. Lastly, the panelists today will be discussing a draft of a job skill taxonomy from Stanford's Haas Center for Public Service. You can download a copy by clicking on the resources button in the bottom right hand corner of your screen. We're eager for all of you who are here today to participate as well as beta test this tool in your own work and provide feedback. Whether you're a student applying for a job, a career counselor, or a faculty member working with Pitt students or an employer, looking to create new pit job functions or recruit public interest technologists. We want to hear from you. We'll provide a survey link at the end of the webinar and in your follow up email. The taxonomy was created through an iterative research process on LinkedIn so it's based on the analysis of hundreds of pit related job postings. I want to emphasize that while a lot of really good work went into this taxonomy it is very much a draft and an intermediary step towards the larger goal of more thoroughly documenting and articulating pit jobs and careers. You're welcome to ask questions anytime through the Q&A box and we'll do our best to address each one of them during the Q&A portion of at the end of the webinar. I want to thank each of our panelists for being here today and give a special thank you to the Integrity Institute, an organization of integrity workers in the tech industry who connected us with Julia Chen, one of our panelists today. Be sure to check out Integrity Institute after the webinar. With that, I'll end it over to our moderator, Brittany Wampler, Director of the Office of Career Development and Exploration at Cleveland State University. Thank you all. Thanks so much, Andrin, and welcome everyone. We are so excited to engage in this conversation today. Before we jump into the conversation, I wanted to go around and share a little bit about each of the panelists that will be joining us in this. What we hope is a very robust conversation. Let's start with Shoshana Cohen. Hi, I'm Shoshana Cohen. I'm at Stanford University with the Haas Center for Public Service. And in my day job, I'm the Director of Community Engaged Learning for Engineering, working with faculty to incorporate community engagement projects into their curriculum. And in my non-day job, I'm also focusing on our public interest technology efforts throughout the university. Thanks, Shoshana. Michelle. Hi, everyone. My name is Michelle Lee. I'm currently an associate of the Partnership for Public Service, a national and nonpartisan nonprofit based here in DC. Thanks so much, Michelle. Priya. Hi, I'm Priya. I use she and they pronouns and I'm a worker owner at Politics Rewired, a political tech startup. Well, I know that Juliet will be joining us shortly and we are excited to introduce her as well. But before she arrives, we're going to kick off with some questions. And we have, as we mentioned, pre-prepared questions for our panelists. And then we want to hear from you. We know that there's a great crowd and that we look forward to hearing and addressing some of the questions that you might be thinking about as well. I'm going to kick us off. I'll start with you, Shoshana Cohen, from Stanford. This job skills taxonomy was a joint effort you led with students at the Haas Center for Public Service. And it actually builds on years long work to institutionalize public interest technology at Stanford and beyond. What was the impetus for this project and what methods did you use to identify these job skills? Well, Andrine actually stole a little bit of the thunder here because she gave the punchline away, which is, when you have a student who's interested in going into a Pitt career, there really isn't a great way for them to go on to a site like LinkedIn or other job platforms and look for that. There's no such thing in there as a Pitt job. And then if you're on the hiring side, there's no such, there's no way to actually find potential candidates for your positions that are interested in Pitt. The vocabulary just isn't there yet. One of the reasons we got engaged in this work in the first place is we have literally thousands of students studying various types of technology at Stanford. And they were getting really frustrated with the fact that most of the opportunities available to them were in what you think of as big tech, and not so much in the public interest technology space. They had a way to prepare themselves and then launch themselves into careers in Pitt. And you're going to actually hear from two graduates in just a moment that had done exactly that. So we wanted to create a pathway for these students to get into Pitt fields. But again, there was no good platform for this. And we talked with a couple of hiring platforms, LinkedIn handshake companies like that, to understand what it would take to have this happen. And they set us on a path of developing this taxonomy. And one other thing, I know you're going to get a chance to ask questions, but I will also say this is really the first time this taxonomy has been introduced outside our small group that worked on it. And I am really excited to get feedback, comments, critical comments. That's fine. It's going to be great to get some external input on to this. Thank you so much. A big reason for this webinar is that we are all part of this emerging field called public interest technology and public conversation and collaboration across our various fields and departments is essential in this work and in growing. Michelle, I'd like to turn to you. You're an associate at partnership for public service and you studied Pitt at Stanford and actually found a Pitt job after graduating, which is a win all around. So you've experienced firsthand the growth of the field in its early years and up to now. What can you tell us about how you ended up at the partnership and what your process looked like. Yeah, that's a really great question. So for context I graduated from Stanford back in 2021. So I've been out of school for a little, almost two years. And a lot of it had to do with the support that I received from various Stanford faculty so mentors advisors at the Hall Center, Public Service Center at Stanford in addition to other professors, but as Andrew mentioned at the beginning of the introduction, Pitt is up and coming field. And as a result, there weren't necessarily many jobs out there that aligned with my interests and one of the difficulties that I found was many of the jobs that were Pitt oriented were mainly geared towards software engineers and data scientists and for me. I was more interested in policy and the public sector. And so I relied heavily on mentors and professors to learn more about the ecosystem of public interest tech at large. So, learning more about foundations nonprofits, government, and how all these sectors work together and where this overlap and through that, for me in regards to my job hunt, what I relied upon was identifying organizations that, you know, receive funding within this ecosystem or we're doing work that aligned with my own interests and then individually going on to their job postings if you're heavily involved in the public interest tech space you know that many individuals have their own mailing lists where they each have their own networks which will post jobs under Pitt and so that was what I did but definitely took a lot more work than hopefully future students and jobs because we have to encounter. Thank you so much for sharing. I know there's a wonderful video that free is highlighted on the pit website about simply this the job search process and how to go about breaking into the field as it is new and evolving so I have asked to share that in the chat as well because I think it is a wonderful way to learn and to hear from students their own experience and thank you so much for sharing Michelle. Welcome, we did a brief introduction but we're so glad that you're here today. I'll have you do a brief introduction of yourself and then I'll ask a question if that's okay with you. Yeah, of course and I'm so sorry I was late. I'm very very excited to be here my name is Juliet Shen my pronouns are she her day. I'm currently a director of product management at grinder. I've only been there for about six months before that I was leading what we call trust and safety product over at Snapchat for the past five years. My career in tech has really been rooted in the trust and safety space which is kind of how I jumped from pit back then we called it civic tech. After college I found a small civic tech startup that really served Asian American communities and serve to mobilize Asian Americans and politicize them through online campaigns. And from there they will make that jump so I'm really excited to be here today and talk to all of you and interesting questions. Thank you so much and we're really excited that you're here today and that's exactly what we'd like to delve into a little bit more is a little bit about your past career so right now you're a director of product at grinder but you've worked in trust and safety you've got this nonprofit, and this is a bit trust and safety in particular is a big area of opportunity for pit interested students. So tell us a little bit more about that in particular and then what skills and capacities have been most important for your own success. Yeah, absolutely. So, as everyone has kind of talked about you know public interest type wasn't really a term or a term, you know a thing when I was in college. And so trust and safety itself didn't really exist either you know the field and the work was there but the term is also relatively new. So trust safety spans a very broad umbrella, and it really is up to a individual companies individual organizations in terms of what they consider trust and safety. In my experience, broadly speaking it includes a lot of the kind of like online safety online harm prevention online abuse detection. So it can venture into more information security some more cybersecurity spaces such as spam detection bots, coordinated attacks, but it can also go into, you know, areas of tech that don't fit so neatly in other parts that does mental health, emotional well being psychological health as well. And of course content moderation that's the other piece. And I think that's where I've seen a lot of folks kind of like either join from public spaces in the tech or go from private tech into government spaces is that policy space. And policy itself is also broad umbrella, it not only refers to kind of the internal platform policies that essentially are the rules that the platform and forces to maintain you know their idea of healthy online communities, but also refers to the external policy piece. And so that can look a little bit more like, you know what traditionally has been lobbying, but it's really meeting with different regulators forming relationships with not only, you know, government agencies but also nonprofits on the ground. And that's often where what we call social impact teams or tech for good teams sit in terms of these larger big tech organizations. I specifically work on product management which within the trust and safety field is a bit of a newer space. Traditionally trust and safety has been very represented by kind of the operational team so these include customer support. Customer support customer experience as well as some of the more like moderation or outsourcing teams, as well as the policy side, the bridging the technical side into that is something that I'm personally very passionate about and we'd love to talk more about. Thank you so much. Let me ask you a quick follow up question to a student who is currently getting ready for a big job searcher thinking about entering pit. What advice would you give them about the industry and breaking in today. So I say there are way more opportunities today than there were when I graduated when I was in college I studied sociology and political science and I didn't know anything about tech I didn't know any of the roles I didn't know any of the job functions. And I certainly didn't think that my humanities degrees would land me a job in tech. So I think the first piece of advice I would give is don't discount yourself, you know, look out there. Don't think that your degrees are not going to set you up for a successful and very impactful and fulfilling career in tech whether it's public interest tech or in the private sector or in the public sector. For product managers specifically, I've actually found that if you look at the college and undergraduate areas of study for a lot of the pms. They are probably the most diverse of the other teams within tech. You have the business majors of course but I see a lot of English majors as well. So in terms of skills I would say to home writing and communication is probably the top one. Having the ability to kind of translate complex ideas and summarize them into a very concise summary is a skill that will get you further than you possibly believe, as well as the ability to kind of coach switch between the different teams. So I often have to use completely different lingo or you know jargon when I'm speaking with the legal teams as they do with engineering teams. But it's also a little bit like being an internal lobbyist or advocate for yourself so pushing for these ideas, being able to advocate for something. And that's where a lot of the access background really comes into play, because a lot of the time is working with all the interest hacker trust and safety tech the issues that you are pushing forward are ones that directly deal with, you know, civil rights, you know, human rights, different kinds of ways that we can protect marginalized communities within the online spaces that we occupy. Thank you so much. Priya, let's move over to you for a bit. Let's shift focus a little bit and get into the jobs and skills taxonomy that Shoshana's team at Stanford work so hard to create. My first question for you is, Priya, like Michelle you are a recent grad and you successfully navigated your way into a career path. In big tech, you worked at a startup and now you're with a worker owned co op called politics rewired that helps grassroots campaigns leverage technology for good. When you look at the taxonomy which focuses on education and skills, which one stand out to you as particularly important for the public interest technology work that you're currently doing. Thank you for that question. I think what first struck me when looking at the one pager is just how broad that list is, and, you know, even like looking at our panel we all come from different backgrounds. And so, to the points that have already been made, there's really space for everyone in this field, no matter what background you're coming from or what you're advocating for. And for me personally, I have been, I have found empathy to be a really important skill. I have found collaboration and communication to be important skills. And I would say that in addition to education and training that you get in a more formal academic setting for me personally some of my like extracurricular interests have been the most influential and helpful. In my day to day work like volunteering on a campaign or organizing mutual aid, those have been what's actually informed and you know helped me be successful in my job. And of course you have that like having a strong education background is helpful too but just to say that like what you do outside of your work and what you do informally also plays a huge role. Totally agree. Juliet what do you make of the education and technical skills listed here you've worked at a number of companies at this point, which ones do you see as most important for public interest roles. Yeah, so I think it, it does depend depending on what kind of area of public interest roles you know people are looking into. I've personally found that my personal interest in in privacy law and copyright law internet regulation law turns out to be really handy because a lot of the governments are thinking about those things and a lot of the law journals are actually putting forward really innovative things that can can be incorporated into the way that you kind of show up and you know create that kind of work. And also the other skills, I really recommend learning the agile framework the agile process and getting that you don't necessarily have to get the certification but just understanding how works, how work actually happens at these companies, you know how something goes from an idea to a full product, and everything will stage with that is really important because I think it helps you leverage yourself at the right moments to create the most impact. So in terms of the other educational training. I really believe that you know having a strong fundamental graphs on privacy is really important just because you know at the internet changes, there's a lot of different legislation that's topping up around the world and having a good view of that is really crucial, and can show an area of expertise that a lot of companies and public interest organizations are really looking for. And then in terms of the day to day I really want to hold down on the philosophy and ethics. You know, one reason that I'm part of the integrity Institute is because we all believe that the work that we do is for the broader public and for the broader society of people not just for individual companies, and having that very strong set of ethics and being able to advocate and speak to it, and kind of create justification for it within a potentially corporate setting or in the government setting is very very key to getting the work done, and finding a role. That's wonderful thank you so much. Michelle in your job at partnership for public service, you help build communities of government innovators, given your experience with those public interest technologists within government. I'm curious to hear which terms resonate with you from page to relative to the soft skills or impact areas and what stands out. Of course, I could definitely speak from my own experience about what has helped me with engaging with government innovators off the bat within soft skills. Kind of all of them I know that's probably not the answer that we all are looking for but I think soft skills really take you far and it's one of those things where hard school such as coding and so forth you know coding languages can change over time. But soft skills are integral with interacting with people from diverse backgrounds and from different fields of study and so being able to context switch from speaking with a technologist software engineer to someone with a legal background I think it's really important. In addition to that within the impact areas. I think it really depends on what industry you're specifically working in within public interest tech for me working with primarily federal agencies. And what I relate to most would be those under government and government tech such as tough tech civic tech tech policy. In addition to civic engagement and also ethics so, for example, we currently see there's a lot of movement in government on open data and transparency and DIA and so I think that really goes far currently. Thank you so much I agree. I have you in the audience that are working in career services centers like myself or Shoshana. I think you're very likely to see a crossover between the nice competencies as well as the soft skills that are listed here and, and they really do. Well, and so I think it's really interesting how we look at the skills we want anyone to gain and the skills we hope that our public interest technologists of the future are gaining they're very much in alignment. And, and perhaps this is even more broad and more specific at the same time in terms of how many skills we hope that people can come into the field with. Great quote and I'll, I love your perspective across the board to that soft skills should be looked more as power skills that everyone needs them, and in order to excel at every level of every organization it's imperative that everyone has them. Any comments there. I'll jump in. I could not agree more, you know I think that calling them soft skills has historically and been a very legacy way of kind of discounting the qualities that you know a lot of people predominantly women tend to thrive in. But I think that these are all skills that absolutely allow people to not only climb and gain more seniority but also establish and carve out that power and influence within a public interest tech organization. And the ones that really stand out to me are public speaking, you know public speaking is something that a lot of people are not comfortable with, but especially within the tech sector. A lot of people are not comfortable with it. And so I used to have this thing and my previous roles where we would do these skills trades, you know, like because I don't come from a technical background. And so, you know, various software engineers would teach me different aspects about different systems working and take me through things and allow me to have a safe space where I can ask a lot of questions. And I would coach them on public speaking. And it really shows how these skills are so because they are so undervalued in so many factors that by the time that it comes to a point where people really need to exert them. There's no foundation for them to have that so having that set of public speaking skills is incredibly important. I also say that time management is really important because in public interest tech, you're often balancing a lot of different responsibilities and obligations, and you have to also contact switch constantly, which doesn't really make it easy for your brain to really focus and get things done in a very very focused way. It's very rare that you'll have more than an hour to kind of spend on a dedicated task at a time, especially for my role in product management I often spend my days in meetings, you know, six, seven hours of meetings at times. And so being able to manage that time to carve out spaces to actually get the things done or delegate, or, you know, rare the right estimates, that's very very important in all kind of tech roles but also in the public interest part. To add to that this was one of the more interesting things we found as we were putting this together. You'll see in the overview that we've, we've bucketed things into three major groups. So knowledge and experience so things you know technical skills, which are fairly obvious, and then a category we called personal qualities and passions, and you can see that the soft skills and the focus on impact areas are kind of tucked underneath one of the things we found was, we went into this thinking, you know, a software engineer is a software engineer. And if a company is focused on working in the public interest, do they really care if their potential software engineer has a passion for things they're working on and the answer is yes, very much so. So you are very unlikely to get hired at a public interest technology firm, unless you have that same area of interest passion things you do in your life outside of work. What was also interesting for us is if you take a company that's not necessarily focused on public interest technology, but has areas within it that do. It's a huge one. Anything to do with limiting access to important parts of society. So many companies have divisions that focus on that. Those are those could be technical or non technical rose a product manager is a product manager they have certain skills, the software engineer has certain skills. They don't matter and the answer is, yes it does. It matters quite a bit where it doesn't matter are companies that I call purely not pit. They're just going about their day doing something that's really not focused in the public interest. They don't care. If you have passions or interest they might care a little bit about soft skills like, you know, being able to collaborate, possibly public speaking, things like that, but they don't actually care where your passion is live. Not for I should say they should they don't care for from the perspective of hiring you. Thank you for that. We are going to jump into a robust conversation of audience questions and let me just say there are a lot of questions coming in, feel free to keep them coming. We will get to as many as we possibly can one of the very easy questions was whether or not there will be a recording to share and the answer to that is resounding yes and we hope you do share it. What will happen is within 48 hours we will update our page to have the recording visible and accessible. And then within the next week will also be following up with the recording and some resources. And everyone to know that I assume that this conversation is something you want to share widely and we want you to do that too. So we'll make sure that you're able to do that within the next 48 hours and then some additional resources within the next week so thank you. But let's jump into some deeper questions the first one being, what are the ways to ensure students are prepared for and are gaining the skills necessary for a career in pit. I'm going to ask Shoshana, and then perhaps Michelle and Priya you can weigh in on some of those skill development areas while you were in school. Yeah, I'm going to be really interested to hear from them about that. The focus area that we had actually in building this out was giving students one experiential opportunities as part of their courses so rather than just learning, you know from a book or from a lecture, they're actually doing projects that engage them in public interest technology. And then the other is, this is not so much about preparation in a classroom, but putting opportunities in front of them, internships, potential fellowships after they graduate, things like that. We focused a lot of effort on bringing organizations to campus that wanted to hire students interested in those things. And we focused a lot on making sure students were ready to actually take go into those positions. That's great. Thank you. Michelle, can I kick it over to you? Yeah. I think there are many different ways to tackle this question. I think for me one way that I prepared for a pit career was honestly storytelling so someone's learned to Juliet's comment on public speaking is being able to tell the story about why you're interested in pursuing a career in public interest tech. So, you know, whether it's a personal background as to why you're interested or really something that resonates with the mission of organization, I think it's really important. Like from what I've found in my early careers, I've mostly forgotten what I've learned at Stanford, which I think might be, I don't think it's a shocking thing to think most people would say this from their college experience, but so I've learned a lot about how government works and how public interest tech space works through internships and through my first two jobs out of college. I think the hardest part was really finding the right organization that match to my own values and how I want to grow. And so being able to hone in on your storytelling and your interviewing skills will get you through the door to be in an organization that can really then teach you the skills to be prepared. Yeah, I love those answers. And I think Shoshana made a great point about how so much of it is what's available to you and, you know, having the vocabulary to explain what kind of your interests are what you want to study or how you want to pursue your career. And then what Michelle said about being intentional about defining your own values and making value driven decisions. Yeah, just pluses to what's been said. That's great. Thank you so much from Michael and thank you Michael for your question. Could, could anyone share some online sites that are designed to help students identify specific job openings or internships that are consistent with the pit un values and goals. I can share some and then really quickly I want to give some tactical tips as well just to answer the last question. So the way I got into tech is I took a customer support job and then I think a lot of people who don't quite realize this is it's quite easy to jump between departments or companies once you get your foot in the door. And so I'd say like, give it a shot. It might work. Go through customer support go through CX because that gives you access to the network and then building those relationships allows you to jump to other teams. So you can kind of hop got your way up into different aspects of public tech or public interest tech I see a lot of people go in through like they go in through customer support or like social media monitor and they jump inside to become the social impact, you know, manager or something. And in terms of websites to look for these jobs, I believe that the TSP a trust and safety professional association they have a pretty good job board on their website. The Technology Coalition is another website that collects job posting specific for child safety so if you care about, you know, children, minor safety minor exploitation. There are a lot of jobs with impact that specifically focus on that area. And then I think the integrity Institute might have some job board listings but I can't remember their members only or not. So I have to follow up on that part but those are the top three that come to mind for me. But there, there are also some job boards out there that are very very focused on this so I'm just to throw one out all tech is human. If you go on there, that's what you're going to see. And there are there are quite a few out there like that. Why shouldn't say quite a few. There are several out there like that. That's great thanks there's also a job board. If you go to pitcases.org backslash job dashboards. So, from the organization itself, there's a job board there too. So, did you want to jump in with some other sites. Yeah, I'm like looking at my phone to see all the mailing list emails I have so some would be data and society bridge coding it forward. And then you can enter on privacy and technology, Brookings Institute, and tech Congress, and so forth and kind of once you are on one of them you will will see the parallels and how they all intersect. That's great thanks. This is such a good question. How big do we envision the public interest technology sector becoming. How do we want to be employed in pit and say five years. I can jump in. So, I think one thing that I do want to be very, very transparent cognizant about is that there are a lot of mass layoffs happening right now in tech and when you look at the type of roles that are impacted, unfortunately they are impacting quite a lot of public interest tech roles. A lot of customer safety roles, a lot of policy roles. A lot of these kind of like roles that are not considered core technology which is product engineering. And so that's something I would just want to be really mindful of that, while this field generally is growing you know more and more companies are realizing that these roles are necessary the importance of these roles. And the field itself is expanding, but I think right now the tech industry as itself is going through a downturn so it's something to just keep in mind, but there are so many other opportunities outside of you know big tech that you know everyone here can speak a little bit about you, especially even within the public sector. Michelle I think you shared the website for me. I can't remember what it was but I would love to promote it. Is it the public dash interest dash tech comm website or. I think so yeah the resource essentially for people from private tech companies to hop the fence and go to public, you know government jobs that deal in the technology sector. Yes, I can hold up. That's actually an interesting byproduct of what's going on right now in big tech with contraction that students are. We have a lot of students that are very tempted to go into a position that frankly pays a lot of money. And many of them really can't afford to go into something that pays less things are kind of evening out right now. Not incredibly but it's getting a little bit more so, and going into a job that doesn't pay as well or doesn't have the kind of upside that other ones do is becoming easier to justify. So I don't know that you may relax and say that a good thing but I think for students, it has made things a little bit more flexible for them. Let me mention very briefly in the bottom right hand corner for the audience there is a resources button, and that is where you can access the resources that we're talking about the document specifically which is the draft of the taxonomy which we've been referring to a few different times over the course of our conversation so you should be able to access that by clicking on resources. Juliet a question specifically for you. It sounds like your background is mostly in social at I use Snapchat. How would you recommend someone in social advertising breaking into pet. That's a good question and it's actually a lot of it's similar to a lot of questions I've gotten from my coworkers at the social companies, you know they work in product marketing management they work in advertisement or as measurement. And they say I want to do something more fulfilling I want to do something that serves a public interest how do I do that. And so, to anyone who's at the social companies. A lot of times, you know, there's like this unofficial 20% rule, a lot of people are working but a lot of times you can get away with just like volunteering on different projects and just building out your familiarity and context. I guarantee that there are teams within the companies that definitely need more hands and help. And so that's something that I have recommended to people who are already at the social companies. Another way is to just to learn about the policy about the different sectors so if you specialize in advertising or commercials or sales or something you can learn about the ways that ads have been misused by bad actors to spread misinformation and disinformation and kind of use that to bridge into the societal impact of that. I'm not sure that totally answers your question but you know if you want to add any clarification I'm happy to answer more more detail. That's great thank you so much. Shoshana, and this is a question that I think anyone who works in career centers and universities and has a responsibility to our students probably thinks about is, how do you keep a list of pit. What's called pit positive firms or organizations and perhaps do you also keep a list of pit oblivious firms or organizations. I don't know that we have a list of pit oblivious. Students can usually sense if an organization has no interest in this whatsoever. I'm actually going to throw this question over to Priya because we have what I consider to be a fantastic newsletter that goes out every week that covers pit opportunities. And I would love to take credit for it except I think really Priya should so do you want to say a little bit more about that. Yeah, that was a really cool project that I got to work on. And it was just about sharing job opportunities internally within like our campus community for public interest tech roles fellowships, etc. And I think the host centers and a really great job of kind of coordinating different centers of work that have been happening for a long time within different threads and organizations, and kind of bringing it together and then with this weekly newsletter sharing partnership opportunities. And you can actually think you don't have to be a Stanford student to subscribe for that. I do not have the link handy right now but I'll send it to Brittany and we can share it. That's great thank you and, and also as someone who has subscribed and it's not a part of the Stanford community I can echo that. So, I do want to mention another quick announcement to everyone. There was an offer feedback form about the taxonomy and that is now publicly accessible so if you already clicked on that and it didn't work the first time please go back in. It is working now and we are good to go. Okay, next question I'm going to let anyone answer this. Let's talk a little bit of, whoops I'm sorry. Let's talk a little bit about becoming a desirable tech employee. And how do you do that in a way that that lands you the job. Michelle Priya you both just went through this. And so I am curious to how that might have worked within your interview process and how you conveyed your interest throughout that process. First, I'll go, I'll go about it in the lens of a public interest technologist since most of my work experience was as a project manager with organizations working in the civic tech public interest space. So in regards to that I think being able to articulate why you connect with the mission. So my first job was with us government tech startup that was when I first joined there were seven bleeds and so I'm really being able to communicate you know why I would be a valuable member of their team, what I got to offer. And so forth and because I was a recent college grad, there are many skills that frankly I didn't have I didn't know what agile meant besides the definition of it and like agile workflow and so forth. Really didn't know what project management looked like in practice and so forth and all those things were tasks and skills I learned on the job but being able in the interview process to show my willingness by willingness to learn and the connection with the mission and so forth. Really, I think got me through the front door and with that, that experience allowed me to work with state agencies in California, which then let me be able to articulate to the partnership. You know why I wanted to work more closely with federal government and the parallels I saw with with state and and the federal level. Yeah, I feel like just to echo what has been said already about making value driven decisions when you're going into the job search, you probably already have an idea of what you're looking for and how your values align with that company that you're interviewing with. And so being able to highlight that was really important. I worked at a public transit startup for a bit and took public transit there talked about how excited I am by public transit like, and those are all, you know, genuine feelings and why I wanted to work there. And I had even linked in DM someone beforehand and, you know, gotten the sense of what the company would be like. And that's actually how I got the interview was just a cold LinkedIn message so yeah, those. That networking is really helpful and being able to speak to the company's actual mission and how like you personally relate to it. Juliette, did you want to weigh into. I did. So I think what Priya said is actually a great segue. Basically, scrappiness is something that a lot of these companies really really value so being really resourceful being scrappy when I first applied for my first startup job, moving from civic tech non non profit to just a random small startup. It was a Wi Fi hotspot company I knew nothing about the space but I read every single blog post they had ever written I studied everyone's LinkedIn. I read all the white papers that they published I read, I went to Google scholar and just like studied Wi Fi hotspots and just like really treated it as a crash course I'm studying. In the cover letter I used how it was for a customer support role and so I likened my experience in college, being part of a sorority saying hey, whatever the sorority of the man a lot of conflicting personalities a lot of strong opinions. Here's how I was able to create Pete, and here's how I can translate that into customer support because I had not worked retail had not done customer support before. Being able to show that you can apply your real life skills in a creative and scrappy way and just find information and really study it can really take you a far way. And, you know, LinkedIn for all the complaints that we have about it really goes a long way as well, you know connecting with people offering people to do a cold coffee. I try to respond to messages on LinkedIn maybe once a week and just do a random coffee with someone who wants to learn a bit more about the space. So you never know who's going to say yes and who's going to give you that opportunity. That's wonderful advice. I love how much research you did on the front end before you even had the interview and I think that just goes to show your own ability to be gritty and scrappy and get into something that you didn't know about so I give you quite a bit of credit because that look at you now and how that launched your career truly. So thank you for sharing that story that's really inspiring. We only have a time for a few more questions so anyone in the audience that has those last minute questions feel free to put them in. I'd like to ask perhaps one of our last few questions one about thoughts everyone has on an education and digital humanities and how that might help guide a career in public interest Okay, I can I can kind of answer the first one. We actually have a new major and Stanford doesn't necessarily launch new majors all the time. We have many that have been around for a long time you have many that are very traditional. We have a brand new major that's called data science and social sciences. And one of the main philosophies behind that is that you don't have to be a technologist a CS person, a software engineer to do data science and you certainly don't need it to apply to the social sciences. And that's why when Juliet was talking about her original career and how people were looking at her saying, how is a sociologist going to do something in tech. The answer is, easily, you just need the right background, and you need to be passionate about studying those things. So, this is a, it's kind of a big deal for us because we don't actually have a data science major, but we didn't until it's. Right, and CSU very similarly just launched a data science major within the last year as well so it's nice to see, you know, in two very different parts of the country that we're focusing on, you know, really relevant and up and coming career pathways and it takes me and most of my staff is here today, because we're all learning together, and trying to plan for careers that don't exist or that are going to be elevated in the next several years. I'm pretty I want to throw a question to you. Can you talk a little bit more about what it's like to work on public interest technology in the social impact sector, and how this might be different than perhaps the for profit tech sector. Yeah, definitely. I think we are our bottom line is different, like we're not just looking to make money. We're also looking to measure the impact that we have and the, you know, amount of time that we save organizers and unions and our optimal client base and yeah I guess that means we have to be really intentional about the technology we're building and make sure that we're really on the ground and understanding what the actual day to day workflows are of the people that we're trying to help and we many of us have an organizing background and we have organizers at the company and so we get to work with them every day and say like oh would you want it like this or this and you know get that real time feedback. And it also means that you have to be clear about what exactly your technology scope to because that is. It's very common to see technology that is trying to do too much, but we're trying to be specific about exactly what points of friction we want to use technology to resolve so that we're being clear about the impact that we want to have. And Juliet you have kind of traversed sectors a little bit can you speak to that a little bit and your thoughts on the same question. I'm so sorry what am I repeating the question one more time. Yeah, it is what it's like to work in public interest technology within the social impact sector. Yeah, so I will say that I worked really closely with someone who was kind of managing all the social impact efforts and so there were a lot of great collaboration opportunities it was a lot of times it's like a snapping each other calling each other be like I have this idea. How do we get this happening and sometimes we're building it without necessarily the full green light from everyone else but a lot of times in tech you get rewarded for that. And so it's about like, it looked like you know reaching out and forming and establishing really strong connections with different organizations and grinder for example we have this social impact arm called grinder for equality. And so what that looks like is they work and travel to different countries where being LGBTQ could be dangerous where it might not be very safe to be out for where it may not be safe to be queer. And they work with activists on the ground to fully understand what are their needs what are they, what is most risky for them is a safer grinder to operate there is a safer grinder to operate there. It's like just by providing an SDK or something. And we work that feedback into the roadmap. So, so my partner who leads grinder for equality and I, we work very closely together so that when I'm doing my teams planning for here the projects we're going to be focusing on for this year. We're incorporating that into every step of the way, all the new features we try to think about it from a safety by design or for a privacy by design perspective. We're incorporating that feedback to be like okay if we build it like this, you know how could that potentially negative impact trans people. If we build it like this, how could that potentially be abused in another way, because a lot of times sometimes we build something for safe reasons and it could be co often abused to target a different marginalized group. So I think that hopefully answered your question but it's a lot of communication, a lot of like Priya said like having that very tight feedback loop of making sure that the people's voices who might not always be represented in tech or might not always be represented and these dominant positions are uplifted and incorporated into the design the execution and the, when we launch things into production. Thank you so much. And I think, you know, the landscape of tech is, it's changing and evolving. And I mean, look at the panelists today, these strong women who are carving out their careers in the industry I think it is really inspiring and I hope that this conversation. I know we've talked to all three of you, all four of you for another hour but I know that we are limited on our time and I see and dream has joined us once again, which I'm very glad to see you once again I hope that everyone here today had some takeaways that they are taking from the conversation I know I did and I really appreciate being involved with us but then just learning from each of you Michelle Shoshana Priya and Juliet. Thank you, Brittany, but I don't want you to escape without asking you a question here. Because there were so many things that were raised about the role of career offices in helping to direct students past so just taking a gander at some of the things that you've heard today. Any inspirations that's striking you in terms of the RFP that we are pushing out to our university network to respond to some of these challenges that were raised today I'd love to hear your feedback on that and some of your thoughts about that. Sure, thank you. So at Cleveland State University, we are interested and very mission focused to help educate our students and prepare them to enter the workforce and whether that is, you know, in a career adjacent to public interest technology or in something wildly different I feel a deep sense of responsibility to support and serve our student body. And so I think the opportunity to bring public interest technology to the forefront of our campus via career fair and other educational opportunities is one that I hope others who are on this call that might work at career centers or also be a part of this movement are taking on and considering submitting applications on on our end. I am going to be looking through the taxonomy to identify the organizations that are regionally affiliated with any of this to to start planting what we are going to be trying to do in the fall 2023 semester to introduce our student body to technology for good and I think it's a really exciting time to to be a student and to have all of these opportunities that are up and coming and available so to my upon Shoshana and her expertise, and I think that there's a really good community of support right now to help elevate the experiences of all of our students, whether it's introducing them to organizations and potential jobs or to helping them to find their own skills to take into the workforce while they're with us for a short time. But thank you, Andrew and for for asking and again I truly am excited and inspired by this conversation and how each of you have gone in different career paths and really launched your own careers in ways that support your soul and your need for impact to Thank you so much, Brittany. I, you know, I always feel a little bit sad for the moderators sometimes because I don't get the wrong impression. I like asking the questions and I love being able to pick and choose which was really fun to to formulate this conversation it was a joy to do this. Thank you. One point I wanted to make in closing and I think Juliet hinted at it at the very beginning which is what's happening with trust and safety teams, and, and to Priya's point about the work that happens in her organization. One, one thing I suggested at the top is that sometimes these pit roles may not be here yet, but we can anticipate them coming. I also want to suggest that departments and plate and umbrella organizations may themselves not exist. If you think about who could take up the charge of trust and safety. This may actually have to come into community organizations, and we may not be able to count on certain sectors to take on a role that they've always had. Right and so I'm hoping that people will see this also as a creative space. Now, and as an innovative space to the point that Juliet made around her colleagues in our colleague at grinder. I think that your colleague is doing in terms of the impact teamwork is something I've often seen happening in the social impact space. Right and so I'm thinking about how some new public interest roles may very well be emerging in that space to Priya's charge in terms of the type of work and questions that were that are part of a design process so frankly I just want to admit that initial dream. I mean sometimes we have to sort of forecast a little bit further into the future of what I'm hoping. I think when when I introduced this this topic area. I said that it's future casting a little bit we have to imagine the world that we are trying to create a little bit. And part of that work I think is seeing the contractions that's happening in some other sectors and how other sectors might have to pull up and take this take on some of that labor, and how all of our partners might help and that might be philanthropy right to support that work just just wanted to surface that as I think as an as a space, but I also want to hear more from all of you about the job skills taxonomy through the survey link that was shared in the chat. And it's a vital part of a first step of beginning to shape and curate this space, more intentionally, because of course it's really helpful when you are a student, it's going to be really important for you to have a clear pathway to Michelle's point earlier because you can always count on being on all the boards and all of the spaces, particularly as it relates from an equity perspective from universities and students that are coming from less resource spaces it's going to be really important for this to be a space they can go to they can all go to and find that pit job. That's really important for us and that's part of the charge of pit UN. And I just raise up a set of advice that was offered earlier which is, please don't discount yourself, and please don't discount your university's role in helping to lead this charge for your students. This is one of the reasons why we have issued this RFP specifically for pit jobs. We know that it may be, it may be not defined, but I'm hoping you all see this as a creative call a creative call to action in many ways. So, please do let us know what you think about the skills taxonomy, please do consider applying through the RFP in partnership if there's a university that is in your neck of the woods please reach out to them and say I'd like to come in and talk about the work I'm doing because I think it's at the top of many of the things that are happening here, and I'd love to do it through this pit career fair, or any of your other career fairs. So I just want to thank all of my panelists it's been really wonderful to listen to you all in women's history month. So, thank you all again, and and look forward forward to the recording of this session which was mentioned at the very top, and also a follow up to all who registered for this session as well. Take care. Goodbye.