 Hi everyone and welcome to our discussion with our 2019 grantees, sorry about that. Real-world pit applications for students during our discussion today we're going to be outlining some of the best ways to get students involved with pit related activities both in and out of academia as well as to help them get a jump start on their career path. So my name is Karen Bannon. I've been here at New America for about six months now and I've been watching how the university network members have jumped right into the fray during the pandemic with tools and applications that are basically helping to change the trajectory of COVID testing, tracking and treatment. And that work and that commitment is why this conversation today is so important. We really can't wait for the best and brightest minds to graduate. We need to get them involved now while they're still in school so we can involve them at the university level as well as in the private and public sectors. So I'd like to start a discussion with some commentary about what each of our panelists is seeing in their own universities in terms of getting that jump and getting students involved in pit related activities. So I'd like to invite our speakers to say hi and give us a little overview of what they're doing in their own universities. So, Kathleen, let's start with you. Kathleen. Hi. Thank you, Karen. I'm a professor in the psychology department at the College of Staten Island which is part of the City University of New York. I'm also the academic coordinator of an extension to our campus which is in hopes of fulfilling our commitment to equity and access for students on Staten Island which is located in the St. George neighborhood of Staten Island. And my grant was focused on helping us to build an intentional learning community for first semester or first year students coming into Staten Island, coming into CSI St. George from four feeder high schools that we believe are sourced for students at that site which we did outreach to the high schools but because of COVID we had to sort of switch our strategies and sort of do some direct recruiting but we do have our first cohort of students matriculated in Gen Ed courses on a path towards their associate's degree which then they will then be matriculated into their bachelor's degree and now with the announcement yesterday that we received year two funding I will be able to see those students through to their associate's degree having taken most of their coursework in pit related courses. Great. Thanks so much. Honestly, Lizzie Garvin from Stanford welcome and I'd love to hear about your what you're doing there at the university. Thanks Karen. At Stanford I guess we have kind of a two tiered approach versus creating an educational baseline for students through their major or minor through their courses. We have a large number of community engaged courses that enable students to get involved with public interest tech partnering community organizations getting involved through research with through our pit lab or departments, institutes on campus that have research projects and then some through capstone projects in their major. So it's kind of the educational baseline. And then in addition to that there are co curricular activities through our cardinal commitment program at Stanford students can get involved in student organizations or other volunteer opportunities such as code the change. And they make a commitment to work with those organizations for three quarters. And then finally we have kind of our career entry points. So we offer through our cardinal quarter program summer fellowships that where students receive a stipend to work full time with a community partner for nine weeks in the summer and we've used our pit UN grants to double the number of pit organizations where students have been doing some of their summer fellowships. And then we also offer postgrad fellowships again increasing the number we're offering through our pit UN grant. This past year we had eight fellowship opportunities in pit organizations for graduating students. And then we provide a whole host of job search support for public interest technology which I hope to get a chance to talk about a little later. Absolutely. Okay, great. So Erhard Erhard is from Olin College of Engineering. Welcome. Hi. Yeah. I'm glad to be here and I'll talk a little bit about what Olin is doing in this. So we have a longstanding tradition of experiential learning, real world applications for our engineering students at Olin and we're excited to build on that with the public interest technology work that we've been doing over the past year or so. With a number of undergraduate students, I helped found a student led organization called Pint which runs as a public interest technology clinic. So students run a consulting clinic where they recruit projects and build longstanding kind of relationships with real world partners and work on really hard questions where they have to make the decisions about what is the right thing to build and I hope I get to share some of those stories. I know we made some videos where I talk about those in depth as well. Also what we've been doing through Pint and that's the opportunity we've been given a second grant to work on is our Pint summer fellowship program which allows students to find their own placements, you know, similar to the way that you might like kind of design your own internship. That's what they do is they find organizations that speak to them that offer opportunities where they really want to grow and then practice being a public interest technologist for the summer and we offered three of those fellowships this past summer. We're excited to offer another five next summer and so there's this really interesting mix of what we're doing where it's a combination of kind of hands on how do we solve real world challenges but also students really owning that educational experience and providing an interesting educational experience for their peers. Okay and I know we're going to, I have so many questions to ask all of you so we will definitely talk about that. So next is Gregory Johnson from Miami Dade College. Gregory I'd love to hear about what you're doing there at the college. Sure. So first off I am the founder of Code for South. We are based in South Florida. We partnered. We're a non-profit that focuses on civic technology and public interest technology. We've been doing this for the last seven years and with Miami Dade College we partnered together to get a grant around helping with building participatory budgeting models. So for us what we did is we got a group of students many of which have never kind of built a real world application and what we did is we sat down with them to understand agile methodologies, user-centric design and bring together local government to build one of the first kind of example applications of participatory budgeting for the city of Miami. Okay well so let's let's jump right in. So I have a lot of questions. I think it would be good to start with just sort of what are the biggest barriers when it comes to getting students involved at the university level. You know we want these folks to be jumping right in but what are some of the big barriers that you're seeing and I don't know who like who'd like to go first. I think what was surprising to me but I didn't think it I guess I thought it shouldn't be surprising to me was that we've spent a lot of time trying to build supports within our student cohort around academic success and finding that especially with the you know the challenges that COVID you know has us facing they're you know starting I can't imagine I mean I I'm getting a bird's eye or like a real close view of what it's like to start college remotely and it's a bit of a challenge in terms of when we're trying to build community and so we've actually integrated the peer networks that we're building amongst the students as part of what we're doing and because one of the the most critical features of what we're doing is a focus on retention because we're really building diversity and inclusion into our project and if we want to build diversity into our tech talent pipeline we really have to ensure that the students get the supports they need to stay in school. Do you know I I actually had a question scheduled to ask you later but I might as well jump right in right right now so so in what ways does building pit address issue building and pit address issues related to racial equity and representation in academic and academic and tech. I mean I think we heard from some great speakers yesterday around this and a lot of what they said really resonated with me as well as as as sort of centering our development of the next generation of technologists on the users right on people that could benefit most from using the technology in critical ways and those who are already adapting common tech in creative ways to meet their needs and that that the people that set to serve should be at the center of how we develop our programs and so you know I very much see what we're doing as as an equity anti-racist project because we want to ensure that we're in building the next generation so that there's an increase in representation and an increase in diversity and you know a you know a privileging of voices for whom that the tech has has the potential to have the most consequences for. So Greg same question for you what are what are some of the biggest barriers you see when it comes to getting students involved on the university level? I think the biggest barrier is you know public and technologies and really like something you can dive in as a junior there's so many complex layers to its interdisciplinary meaning you need to understand a little bit of technology policy and sometimes for students especially engineering and computer science students they think okay I'm going to write some code and it pushes to the world but it really is focusing on users and understanding the various stakeholders that and what we're seeing kind of in Miami which is very diverse with Miami-Dade College has had a huge like Hispanic Latinx crowd and for this space there's not a lot of black and brown people in civic technologies and public inter-technology so I think facing representation and showing them kind of like winning career pathways is one of the challenges as well as one of the opportunities that we've seen. So I was going to ask you about sort of your take on diversity inclusion in Pitt and Civic technology you know why are we where we are right now and how can we turn it around? Yeah thanks for asking that so Code for South Florida we're one of the most diverse we're part of the Code for America Network but one of the most diverse in terms of like having women black and brown Hispanic people on our staff and then land e-plasticity network and I think it just kind of goes to the diversity problem I think it's about having code of conducts that make sure that it's a safe space for both women and men and people of different backgrounds and identities to have a safe space to and finding mentorship so a lot of these people that come and work on these projects including students are looking for mentors that can talk to them and kind of like tell them about different pathways when you kind of see those people you kind of envision where you want to be and oftentimes when you think technology people see big tech but don't see that most of these big tech companies have state and local government programs that tie into public interest so that's some of the ways that I think about it and I think with having a diverse team we can kind of like approach that as well as create an inclusive space and demonstrate what diversity really means and kind of like discovering ways to bring in more people so it's not just the tech brofets but it's something that anybody can participate in technical or non-technical. Great thanks Earhart. So tell me where do you see the biggest barriers and you know how are you how are you handling them at Olin College? Yeah so I think one of the most common barriers for undergraduate students is that they have so many opportunities that are competing for their time right and if we're looking at these things as extracurricular activities right this is on top of you know a very intense program of study as well as other competing interests that you know might take them in different directions and so you have to find ways that kind of speak to the interest that they have their desire for learning and at Olin that really comes down to the students kind of owning that work right and so you know we've been really excited to see that Pint is a student led organization like I am merely the faculty advisor right and it's very intentional that I take that role because you know it's it's more authentic for them as learning experience when it's other students that are creating it and well you know Gregor you were saying that you know it's hard for folks kind of like even at the junior level to get involved this work Pint was started by first year students at Olin right they came up with the ideas they worked with me to kind of come up with the framework of what would be an exciting program for students and how that could look in different ways they co-wrote the grant with me over the summer that helped launch the organization so I think that there's a lot of interest right now in this generation of undergrads right and what I think has been so interesting when it comes to this question of barriers at Olin is that you know we we actually have a program in our admissions office where we bring in 50-50 on the gender spectrum coming in as as first year in our in our first year classes and what's been interesting in Pint is to then see that it's been largely a female identity leadership team and a lot of the folks who have come in and joined the organization identify as female as well and so it's been this interesting question about how do they actually expand to bring in more folks that identify as male into the program and think about what what does that mean actually for public interest technology as a space because I think you're right that it addresses some of these issues by being emphasis by emphasizing the equity question emphasizing real world applications that gets these groups excited that often fall out of technology in STEM because they don't have that resonance of working on real problems that they care about and so what's interesting for us is to think about it you know how do we create a space that actually is inclusive for for everyone and those challenges I think met look different in public interest tech than maybe they look at in some other tech sectors so what like sounds like your students are really split that they are working half half of the time outside of the class but then half the time they're doing it on their own so how does that how does that happen so you can you can create these authentic public interest technology experiences yeah so I think part of it is we need more humanities and social science curriculum within STEM right like I think a lot of this work comes down to what at all and we've been calling context and ethics within engineering like if you don't understand context you don't know how to deal with kind of complexity and nuance then that's going to make it really hard to do your public interest technology work when you're working with real stakeholders and so we've been thinking about how do we bring that into our engineering classes as well as into our design classes and our arts humanities and social science classes so they kind of create a mix that allows for students to kind of think holistically about their role as engineers in the world because I think that humanities and social science piece gets at this deeper question for public interest tech which is what is our personal and professional identities and how are those evolving to recognize that we are more than just kind of quote-unquote problem solvers that we are deeply engaged with communities with society around us we kind of have this almost civic aspect to our professional identities and I think that that's going to be really important okay so Leslie same question for you how are what are the biggest barriers that you see and and how is your university overcoming those barriers some of the barriers we face are similar one is just student mind share there's so much happening so many opportunities for students to get involved in all the time so just kind of getting some more visibility for public interest technology is one constant challenge that we have another challenge we have is that we're on a quarter system so how do you provide ethical and effective and meaningful community engage projects within courses that are when there's really only essentially nine or ten weeks in a quarter where they have a chance to engage on those projects so looking at having multiple projects that span multiple courses multiple quarters full year with partners I think is one way we're addressing that and then in terms of the career entry points we may have a little bit of a different situation that's tampered in that 40 of our students are in a technical major or minor and so there and the our location means we're right here in Silicon Valley next to a lot of the corporate headquarters so the corporate tech presence on campus is really overwhelming my my colleague at their career center calls it the the recruiting party buses it's it's almost as if google and apple and facebook and microsoft show up on campus with these huge tricked out party buses everything you need included in them and they whisk you away to your you know they do all the recruiting interviewing give you high salaries they do it all on campus and then you get whisked away to your you know high paying job or high paying summer internship in those companies and so you know one thing one thing is difficult is to to make the pit opportunities for internships and jobs visible kind of because it's complicated some of them are in policy some of them are in tech nonprofits some of them are in social enterprises and so those paths aren't clear for students and so one of the things that we've done is we research and curate and publish weekly of pit jobs internships and fellowships and opportunities newsletter we have a subscribership of about 460 students on campus right now and so we have a small team of students and they just comb all the job boards on a weekly basis and then list those opportunities and by categories and we do we do a push so we're trying to show students what the opportunities are and and do the research for them and make it easy for them to just click on something to find out more information and then to apply and i think that's one of the ways we're able to make a difference in addition to offering prearranged internship and postgrad fellowship placements again where we go out we contact the partners we get the the position lined up and all students have to do is apply on campus and then for those fellowship opportunities they get to apply earlier than you would if you're just applying for jobs on your own and so in some ways that kind of reduces the disparity between the corporate recruiting which happens very early in the year and the nonprofit job offerings which tend to happen kind of like just just in time very late in the year for students so it's interesting so you and i can picture it because i remember the like a long time ago going to some of the conferences and they'd have those buses for all the press but so how do you find pit organizations then that will be willing to partner with students on projects i mean it sounds like you've got an overwhelming amount of you know the big people with lots and lots of money so how do you find those small organizations that probably aren't going to have that kind of salary range or you know even might not be as sexy or as exciting there's there's just a lot of hard legwork involved in researching tech nonprofits looking to see which ones are posting jobs and internships on their own and just reaching out and contacting them we have like huge google sheets full of pit organizations that we've identified and contacts and then we just you know keep contacting them asking them if they would be willing to host a summer fellow or a post-grad fellow or even begging them to come to our big career fairs on campus which they don't typically attend especially the smaller nonprofit organizations offering to pay for their registration fees for the fall career fair on campus so that we can have some some of those organizations present there it's just it's a lot of legwork okay um so i'd like to switch back to greg um so i'd love to hear a little bit about more of what you're doing there i hope for the south and and also what you think of civic tech nonprofits and community groups what they group what they play in helping colleges and universities in the the pit find success sure and what i'd first say is the one thing i really loved about my b-day college is Antonio Delgado the the dean of engineering when he first reached out and was applying for new america he came out to me and said greg you know you're a leader in this space you've worked for private sector through microsoft you've done stuff through go for south you have a understanding of not only just working for the public sector nonprofit sector and you're young so i think the way my perspective is of this is that um is a nonprofit organization kind of doing this work it's very like like many have said it's very difficult to kind of like make this intro when there's so many big tech companies having presence but the opportunities that we've seen is working closely with my b-day college to build a model that any public college can kind of like incorporate in introducing this to undergrad students with an emphasis on things that i think this market doesn't really have much of which is first off paying students second off giving these students connections with people that are in government roles that are in small non-profit roles to see kind of the scope and what they can do in these roles and kind of painting that picture that hey you may not get the salary that's at microsoft or google but you can still do the same impact so i think from our perspective we're kind of like taking an outsider stance but the same time many of these students are kind of like recognizing that hey this is not something that's like insurmountable i can go out and do this i can get paid for doing this and more importantly the work that i'm doing can touch and impact people positively and i think just being based in miami because of our geographic region and presence to caribbean and latin america we have many kind of students that identify and really recognize the role that government has to play and how technology can better the lives of people okay um so let's go back to airheart um you know i i'd i'd like to hear a little bit about um you know how can we help students help the private and public sector employers better understand the work of pit i think this sort of all goes back to so since i started working with new america the definition of pit i've seen it sort of change and move and grow so how can we help students help the companies understand what pit is and and and why it's so important i think the the biggest thing we can do is help students start to identify as public interest technologists while they're still on campus right um you know before they go off to that first internship um and certainly before they go off to that first job because if they develop that as part of what their personal and professional identity is then they're going to bring that into that job and they're going to spread that message right they're going to be our best ambassadors to help these private and public sector spaces kind of understand like oh wait there's something unique here like this student you know has a mindset and values um that are important to the ways that we want to make change in the world right um and it's not just those technical skills um and as they put that emphasis on there and they say you know like i'm connected with other folks and there's other folks behind me who are coming up and going to graduate next um to do this work that i think you know they're that helps develop that pipeline and help people get familiar with that language around public interest technology and then we'll see some folks come back um and kind of like a feedback loop to the schools and be like you know these folks that you sent us that are calling themselves public interest technologists we want more of them right um and we want to know more about you know what does that mean that you're producing those folks right um and i think so but that's that's work that the students have to do and we have to create spaces for them to do that while they're still on campus i think we can you know make those connections through our post graduate planning offices you know uh through our alumni relations offices where they have those conversations um you know going out into the community whether that's you know the only college community or whether that's into the community of folks that hires only college students um but i think that really starts with having kind of like the students do that work to identify there and then start asking those questions right you know when they start having conversations with you know job interviews be like so what do you think like where do you fall on these questions of equity right and inclusion um because that's something why by which i'm measuring where i want to work right um and have those same questions of course the students are already doing that in our clinic work and when they're thinking about who they want to work with over the summer um on different projects right they're already having that kind of conversation with those groups and so i think the more that the students kind of are generating those conversations and pushing all of us to be more honest about actually doing the the work of public interest technology i think that'll actually help with this this question about making the connections to the public and private sector so katie um one of the questions i had was you know is it important or how important is it to reach down to the high school level to bring this work to tomorrow's students and tomorrow's college students that is and how can this be done so i know you're already doing this so can you tell us a little bit more about that sure and i want to kind of i've been listening very intently to everybody's been saying and i kind of want to go back to a couple of things which is relevant to your question as well karen um you know i think what we're talking a lot about in terms of access is also a notion of gatekeeping and um the way that we forged our learning community was with a focus of attracting students who would be attracted to the humanities and social sciences so we have a group of students that are interested in the more creative side of life like their storytellers there and i have a few in the audience so shout out to my pit crew my CSI pit crew um that's in the chat you know hopefully claus and a ruckus um uh you know they're they're dynamic they're really in tune with like what's happening in the world and they they're uh they have a sort of entrepreneurial spirit that they want to go out there and and create these opportunities for themselves um one of the things that that excited me and drew me to pit was this idea that we could forge pathways into giving students marketable real-world tech skills outside of a traditional computer science degree and i don't want to disrespect traditional computer science but i actually today this happened in in uh counseling with one of the students in academic counseling um he was wanting to be a computer science major but but his what the courses that that degree requires did not gel with the courses in our learning community and would be seen as extra and not on track and putting him behind and like that was literally the language that this academic counselor was using with the both of us and um and so you know i reassured him that we're creating our own new major which is one of the objectives of our second year because we have this great um interdisciplinary program at CUNY called the CUNY BA program where we can create our own majors across all of the CUNYs and and i'm going to be or we're going to be building one of those majors and have it be named public interest tech um so so um so and we want to drill down to understanding from the tech industry perspective what are those skills those basic skill sets that could get people into those entry-level jobs because you know as we know like most people just learn as they go and um and and you know from my students who many of whom are first-generation college goers that that first they're still in their first semester and imagine hearing you know and again no diss to my college but you know imagine just hearing in that first semester well you know you're already behind on math and you're already you have to take this math and that path and now you'll have to take an extra winter class and a summer class you know that's gonna undermine retention in a big way and so especially you know so anyway so so how we how we maintain a certain gatekeeping in the field is is critical to understanding you know the impact that that we can have in this work and then you know leaving there to be this openness around how we can create new opportunities um in the world and also you know the fact that you know my many of my students are social activists they're their advocates for social justice and they want to be able to demonstrate to the community groups that they're involved in how can we use tech to further the goals of these community organizations so we're centered in the organizations we're centered in the communities and we're bringing tech skills to these groups versus you know trying to find like a nonprofit that understands tech like we're gonna bring data science and how we use you know numbers and how we can you know create impact and and and messaging to these organizations so that's our hope and it is starting in high school and and for me it's you know it's taking the approach of harnessing the assets that we have at the secondary level as well as having a deep communication with our high school partners as to what we need them to focus on to help our students feel better prepared for college work so we're going to be doing a lot of college preparedness kind of conversations but my students the students that we have in our cohort we're already engaged in like really cool things like building podcasts and and you know doing things on SoundCloud and you know and so so for me it's about identifying students that have certain assets that we could then enhance by them being involved in our coursework but the college especially for us because we're so place-based and we're so focused and you know deeply entrenched in the community these high school to college pipelines are critical and and we're also involved in what's now like a p-tech project where students would be able to earn an associate's degree in computer science as they're in high school so you know creative ways of engaging and making that transition from high school to college is critically important especially as it relates to retention and supporting racial equity issues and and also we want to build into what we do this emphasis on the importance of representation so right now we have a representation problem on Staten Island with terms of of racial equity around who our teachers are and our college struggles with the same issue and so we're trying to build capacity amongst peers so that students can you know and and Earhart like we're kind of like going to follow your lead in terms of building a student-based organization so students can see other peers and identify with other peers who may come from similar neighborhoods or similar life experiences and feel that their identity is affirmed and that they can envision themselves as you know what their calling is and and follow through with that and I'm just here to help facilitate the process you know I do want this to be like a discussion so do any of our other panelists have anything to say about what Katie just said or anything to add just please jump right in yeah I completely agree with a lot of things that Katie said and as a first generation kind of college grad I can kind of like really identify with that for me I started this work in high school and that led to so many opportunities and I think many years ago when I took dual enrollment classes at Miami-Dade College there's many opportunities today I think as we kind of work through Miami-Dade College and bringing more students to public interest technology work the great opportunities they have so many programs like data analytics they have programs introducing students to Azure fundamentals and then when we're working on these projects I can really sit down with these students and be like okay I know this is what your computer science class is teaching you but these are the skill sets that are going to help you get that entry-level job and these are the experiences that are going to help paint that picture a good story of that as we worked on this parts very budgeting project for over a year and we got a group of students ten of which nine have never programmed or worked on a web application and one that was really kind of like killing it in terms of deploying and leading the team and we're able to work with them to get this deployed but not only just understand like how to get that application employed but aligning the technology to what the specific partner has used before in the past and what that unlocked for us is an opportunity to teach you students about like understanding tech stacks like every organization doesn't use the latest thing they may not use react they may not understand Docker or Kubernetes or all these cool technologies but there may be something in there specifically that you can hone and build your skill set on so when it's time to get out of the classroom and look for a job you can do that and I think what's important through the work that we've seen but kind of like aligning skills insert to working with these organizations is being really kind of like this is a real-world experience you're getting paid for it but also this is a real teammate that you're working with and when you prepare to transition out of this and go into a job interview because I've been in those interviews with big tech companies these are how you can kind of tell your stories to illustrate your skill set so I think it's very important I think skills inserts are kind of like undervalued kind of in this in this in this climate where Google and Amazon have so many things that are up for a hundred two hundred dollars where you can go up and earn a certificate which can get you looked at by many of these big companies and more importantly understand the right departments to go into if you're looking for paid careers again state and local government team policy teams twitter facebook google a lot of these companies have it but students just don't know so I think from opportunities that we we create with them it's enlightening them to these different departments. Erhard did you want to add something I saw you yeah sure so I really want to go back to this question about high school and how that's part of this larger pipeline that we're building because I think we've put a lot of emphasis in the U.S. on STEM education at the high school level right and so we see more and more students from a range of different high schools it's not perfectly equal yet by far but you know much greater range of folks are getting some exposure to this stuff and seeing themselves as STEM professionals early on which is really exciting but I don't think we've seen a similar emphasis addressing the lack of compelling civics education in K through 12 right this idea that like if we're going to ask people to be serving the public interest as technologists they better have some idea about what does it mean to serve the public interest well what does it mean to act democratically right if we think about you know like all these initiatives of democratizing data or democratizing technology what does that even mean right how do students understand how to actually imagine how you would go about doing that and what that means in terms of a different set of commitments in your design work a different set of ways that you understand your role and expertise as serving society like that's got to start early on we have research from folks like Aaron check that talks about you know like the the failure of engineering programs over the course of four years to preserve public welfare commitments among their students right like that all in was one of the schools in that study where the students were found that over four years of being exposed to undergraduate engineering they no longer had strong feelings about their service to public welfare like that's a big problem right and so we need to think about how we're actually addressing that as a society at the high school level as well as how we're thinking about that in higher education i think that needs to be part of what we think about when it comes to public interest technology it's not just about those tech skills but it's about those civic skills leslie did you have something to add oh i just totally agree with what airheart was just saying a lot of that needs to be embedded into the courses in the in the computer science departments in the related departments and i'm encouraged that a lot of that is happening but i also wanted to touch on something that katie mentioned which is kind of the peer to peer influence that is just paramount at stanford we have a student run lab it's called the pit lab which is very similar to the pint lab at olyn and they have tremendous energy and vision and just influence and ability to get things going so i think more and more one of my roles is to work on convening the leaders of the student organizations that are related to computer science and public interest technology and helping and supporting and facilitating their work because often they're ahead of the adults so i i'm sorry can i just jump in for a sec please katie go ahead i just wanted to piggyback on something that gregory was saying around a unique opportunity that our students are going to have especially more fully developed in the second year is that csi also has a tech incubator and so that runs sort of independent of the college but or is tangentially related to the college but and so and there we have they they court a diverse set of talent who are tech entrepreneurs and tech startups and so we're hoping that we can they'll serve as mentors to a students in our program so they're going to get you know direct connection to that sort of extracurricular co-curricular contact with tech entrepreneurs as well as doing what gregory was talking about excuse me which is providing them credentialized marketable tech skills that they'll be credentialized in the second year that again is i don't even know we need a term for this extracurricular co-curricular and we're hoping to also create a sort of innovative sort of blockchain project which with handshake actually to allow students to store their credentials because they'll be block certified and they'll have certified credentials attached to their academic records and so this idea of micro credentialing i think is something that's you know really important for the 21st century i don't know what we call this now post-covid you know academic you know post-secondary school you know landscape or ecosystem so funny we we so i'm the editor-in-chief of not just a pit universe which i know a lot of you get but the the commons which also you should all subscribe to and um and we actually did a whole story about micro credentialing and and how how it is going to be sort of the something that's not just in the tech field but across the board so um so we're actually almost to the q and a portion of the event and i we didn't even i feel like we haven't even dug into everything and i'm watching we've got we're getting some really great questions coming in from the students so if anyone has questions please go ahead and put them into the q and a but um i i'd love to maybe hear a little bit more about what you're doing on on your own campuses so um why don't we start with gregory um you need to do you think it's important for undergrad students and graduates to participate in civic technology projects early i know you we've you've talked about it already today but i'd love to hear a little bit more about that so in short yes i mean that's how i got into where i am in my field as well as working on civic technology projects as an undergrad i think it's important in a couple of ways one you get to see the world so there's open source and then there's civic tech and open source and civic tech and open source is a lot different than the open source world where there's these projects that are maintained well civic tech actually doesn't have like a good at least from the standing that i see a track record of what people that take these projects and go from small to big so when you get these new students undergrads that are on these projects you get to kind of show them this like real world example of this is why open source is important and i think what's really important is like seeing this notion of impact somebody mentioned like black lives matter and like the racial equity movement it's like yes this is nice but what role does technology play in that here in miami we're able to work closely to release an initiative called badge watch which we modernized and made searchable uh policemen's conduct records and complaints to the broader public released it and it was like like we got so much press and news more importantly we got a lot of students saying hey we want to work on this project we we didn't know that we could do this and this would be the results so it's like when you see these things you often sometimes disconnect the power of technology to influence government as well as help people in public services and civic technology projects like that can help um lastly what i'd say is collaboration for me and the work that we're doing at code for south we've worked with many other cities and la nyc and we take take that same mindset to how we approach south florida we've been teaming up with florida international university right now i'm a jsk fellow for stanford so i'm finding these different like kind of like um opportunities to do data sharing and not just take a open source repo and work with the undergrad student at miami day college and say to the student here's a different student at fi u they also have a p it program is a student at stanford they also have a p it program let's work collaboratively on this initiative and figure out ways that we can scale this application community to community and i think when you have those stories that experience is just wonderful and you can take that to any interview more importantly you have a new connection and a new location that you may not have known before so that's what we're seeing in some of our work with students at miami day college okay um erhard so i i know that you're both a social scientist and a public interest technologist so um can you talk a little bit about um the you know how you're sort of looking at the responsibilities of engineers as citizens and um and how you can sort of help students understand what basically what the responsibility is yeah sure uh great question um and one of my something that i'm really excited about right personally um so i think you know one of the most interesting things i'm engaged with on that um is this Kettering Foundation uh research network that's looking at civic professionalism in higher education so this idea that like professionals need to have civic responsibilities at the core of their professional identities right and how do we actually help students in higher education context develop that identity in that set of commitments um and so i've been really interested in the ways that we've been able to try and do that within pint so the students have a lot of questions that they ask themselves kind of these reflective exercises that they go through within their team meetings where they're constantly exploring what does it mean to be a public interest technologist right and they're exploring different frameworks like the design justice networks uh principles um you know like the work that Lornell McCann and others have done on build with not for within the civic technology space and how those actually have a kind of underlying set of values and commitments um that are about you know who they are as a as a person as well as a professional um and so that's where I get really excited I've been thinking about ways to bring that into classes and I'm teaching for the first time um an intro class called democracy and media um which is one of the arts humanities and social science options that all first years can take um and I have a module specifically about what does it mean to be both a citizen and an engineer like what does that mean to do that kind of design work right um how do you ask yourself kind of hard questions um that you know are really asking social scientific questions about the inequalities in the world that you see around you right um and the work that designs do right um in terms of affecting democracy um in terms of you know either um amplifying those inequalities um or reducing them um and so when we have those kind of hard questions in class and the students you know then through point hopefully have an opportunity to then work and grapple with those things in real world um applications like I that's where I get most excited um and that's what I'm I've been trying to do at all in okay um so Leslie you know I'd love to hear a little bit more from you about how we find pit organizations willing to partner with students on projects but then also how you promote those opportunities to students on your campus and I mentioned that you had the um the the job board but um what are some of the other ways that you're working with pit organizations um yeah a few a few things I mean in terms of finding organizations to partner with research projects in classrooms I have to give a shout out to my colleague Shoshana Cohen who manages that at Stanford and she does a tremendous job I wish she could answer that question directly for you um but in terms of getting partnered I work more on the career side the internships and jobs and fellowships and um you know on that side several things um as I mentioned we just we you know we understand that those organizations are very busy and so we try to make it easy on them to partner with us we do a lot of outreach we um list their opportunities in our newsletter um we also do a lot of work of looking up alums who are working in these organizations and connecting students to alumni um and then hosting career panels um uh we we do a career panel on public interest technology around every couple of months um and sometimes they focus on specific issues like advocating for racial justice within tech or um a response tech responsibility in the era of COVID um and sometimes there are just more career panels where we um highlight various career pathways um we um a couple of our students did um a little video on how to find a job in PITS where they kind of um outline like the different types of PIT organizations so they talk about social enterprises, tech non-profits um gov tech and civic tech um what we call government-adjusted organizations like Code for America and AT&F and Nava who do you know pro technical projects for government and um yeah they kind of spell that all out and talk about how how you look for those jobs um and how you prepare yourself for those so happy to share that with anyone who um would like to see or use that video but I definitely think bringing in alums and having events that constantly highlight the opportunities and the incredible impact that you can have I mean our students are doing internships and organizations like Tarjimli which provides on-demand translation services for refugees um or data for black lives or Rahim or recidivist organizations tracking doing big data analysis on things like criminal justice reform and police um violence and I mean the just hearing the alums talk about the impact you can have in these positions it's it's just really incredible um and that's one way you can really bring a lot of visibility to the issue so you need to send me the link so that I can forward it out for in the next issue of pit universe um so we're actually coming to the end of our time together this went incredibly fast um and I'm watching the questions come in so why don't we take a couple of questions here um so we have a question here uh it says I appreciated Earhart's points about engineering education impacting students' perceptions of their civic obligations I know a major concern from many of my friends who are recent undergrads so that they don't yet have the level of technical expertise that they need to be a great engineer and therefore have a strong desire to work at some of the larger companies mentioned which have very particular and clearly successful strategies for developing and applying technical skills this is long one question um so the question is are there opportunities to continue developing those technical skills in the existing pit industry the same way they exist to some of the larger companies or if not at least at not the same level how do you convince recent undergrads that they shouldn't go to the big tech companies right out of school especially considering the impact on the engineering world and what those companies have it's a long question I don't know if I'm meant to answer that I feel like we could all probably offer some answers to that question um but I will say that I think that there's a bit too much of an emphasis on technical skill development um in general when we think about going into like technology jobs like there is a lot of on-the-job training that happens like you have to learn like like Gregory was saying you have to learn the stacks of a lot of different organizations and kind of often you know learn new languages in order to do the work effectively in those in those groups or on those projects and I think it's actually those non-technical skills that are the most important ones for students to take away kind of with a more liberal education and so I understand the concern like the feeling that the student needs to get more and more technical skills and in some applications that's absolutely true right like there are some spaces within machine learning right where like the top machine learning folks you know are often you know having PhDs in their in their respective fields um but I think that if you're really interested in that entry level work it's actually on the job experience that's more important so I would start with that kind of like summer internship programs as soon as you can you know like after first year after second year start getting work you know it doesn't always have to be at work at google either right like those first jobs as long as you're doing some on-the-ground technology work like future folks that are going to hire you are going to look at that and be like oh like I don't have to tell this person that like what software engineering really means like in terms of like you know a testing environment and quality assurance and things like that because they've done some of that work already and so I would I would emphasize that the more opportunities for really experience doing that work and spending less time thinking about how you're building that in classes would be my advice so I've actually got a question here for Gregory so Gregory um Ruthie says would love to hear an example of what Gregory is referencing when he says he supports his students in telling their stories what does that sound like and how do you support students in doing that well so telling the student story yep she said um I guess it's forces students in telling their stories yeah I think it's I think it's a mixture of things and LA what we're seeing is um they've created this nice um spreadsheet where students who work on projects can kind of like map out what they did and then after that once they map that out be able to distill it to something that they can point on their resume so I think there's two ways of telling the story right it's the first is like the identity like first it's letting students know that when you're going into these hiring decisions or hiring processes for companies there's thousands of people that are qualified for the role and what often pushes you to the edge beyond being qualified is your humanity right it's saying something that this is why I want to be a part of this this role this is what I'm passionate about and I don't know for every role but for the roles that I've gotten it's always been kind of like being able to convey that story of why I'm doing this which is pushed to the edge I think it's also about just looking at the why a lot of the students that we work with that come on these public energy technology projects they have a why they have a story and sometimes they just don't know effectively how to say the story or why the story is super important to the industry when you think about like Black Lives Matter I mentioned badge watch and police misconduct you know people would think okay this is like something that black students would resonate with but there's a lot of Hispanics that resonate with police misconduct so I think the way we convey it to them is kind of finding their why and then when looking for these companies beyond just looking at like the technical role of software engineer really diving deep into the departments and teams that they're trying to get to not even at big tech companies but smaller companies too to make sure that their stories align up meaning that they're not just applying for jobs and hope to get anything but they're kind of being very focused and deliberate with what they're trying to get to with something that aligns either to the professional work experience or how they think of themselves identity wise and the reason I we do that is we also kind of pull from stories from many of the engineers and designers and product managers that I know at companies like at Code for America, Nava PVC, Microsoft, City of Miami, state government all of these stories have a little bit of a glimmer or shape of like how you can be impactful in roles that are not just big tech and I think being able to share those stories as well as like help them come up with them is one of the tactics we've been experimenting with that has been very successful actually I think for some of the people that have worked on our team we actually hired somebody from Miami Day College after working with them on a project for like three months and it was based on their story and their and their hustle and their impact for us as an organization. Can I quickly add to that? Sure. Because I think if you get the why right like Gregory's talking about the tech skills come with it right because that pulls you into learning what you need to know to address those challenges that you're passionate about so I think that that's absolutely great advice. So we're actually almost at the end of our time together but there's two great questions and one of them is basically what are some of the ways of pitching opportunities to students who have never heard of the phrase or never or don't have any familiarity in the field and then I have someone else who asked you know how do you suggest that new and young students get involved in basically an environment where we're all virtual so I probably got like a minute so maybe each of my each of the panelists can spend 30 seconds just hitting those points and then we'll and then we'll seed the seed our space and let everyone go back. I can start so my colleague Crystal who I think is in the audience and I she was of great support with helping me connect to the high schools in her role at CSI and we and then we worked with our admissions and and student orientation offices to identify students who would sort of be the right students to to be in our group and so I would I would have to like cold call students and say hey do you want to be in this cool new thing and it was a little it was very intimidating and of course you know reaching out that directly to students was a little off-putting of sorts but I mean I think I hit on like points around like we're looking for innovators and influencers and activists right and so kind of like hitting the energy or the vibe of what's behind's pit and then saying you know using tech for good or using tech to move you know your goals forward and we were also able to attract creatives and and I thought that was pretty cool too in that there is something about creative expression that lends itself to wanting to engage tech and and I think we see this a lot in how and you know how users produce content online and so when we sort of think about how students potential students may already be producing content online and be quite active and engaged in using tech in in this way you know sort of catching them where they're at seems to be helpful also I have a lot of student community meetings and we we're open about that we're we're building what this thing is like we're building the definition of pit and actually Carlos from Miami Dade earlier today we were in a in a group and you know there is something powerful about this process that we're all engaged in in trying to define pit and it's almost it it's almost better than finding the answer so just engaging with trying to discover or trying to emphasize public interest tech I think is bringing us closer or or moving us in a particular way it has a catalyzing effect I did it I watched everyone do it and I did too anyone else want to add something before we end today I'll just say that students are asking for public interest technology they may not be using those words but we as academic advisors we as administrators at schools we just need to be listening for it because they're asking for it and you as students if there isn't an opportunity at your school already you know join folks like Gregory and you know at one of those Code for America brigades they're doing hack nights you know and they're doing them virtually and you can get involved I have a bunch of students that have that have gotten involved in Code for Boston over the years so so I think the students are already doing it we just got to you know keep helping them do it more and if I can just add one last thing too that you know what we were as seasoned faculty members what we've been like forced into doing in terms of integrating technology to enhance how we teach and and what we you know do in the classroom is is is for some of us like you know enhancing how we connect with students and my hope is that even if we kind of go back to some of the in-person stuff that we won't lose some of what we've gained in terms of how we network and connect and relate to students in in the virtual world okay well thank you so much to all of the the speakers and panelists and sure we'll see you later on as well we it's not over there's still plenty of plenty of other panels and we've got our social hour tonight as well I heard the poetry is going to be awesome so thank you so much and have a great day