 Hi, I'm Sam Datesman, and I'm a student organizer at Olin College's Public Interest Technology Clinic. I'm here today with our faculty mentor, Earhart Graf, to discuss our Public Interest Tech Fellowship Program. Hi, this is Earhart, Assistant Professor of Social and Computer Science at Olin College and Olin's Public Interest Technology University Network, Designee. We received funding from the 2020 PITUN Network Challenge to grow this fellowship program, and we are excited to share our story. This summer, we supported five fellows at the level of $6,000 to pursue public interest technology work. The fellows applied their engineering and design skills through a practice of public interest technology. They built relationships with public interest organizations and worked with them to scope their roles over the summer. I, along with fellow students, designed and run the fellowship program. Since this is our second year of the fellowship program and the organizers are all prospective public interest technologists, we've learned a lot more about what other students need to thrive. The application is a reflective process that asks students to examine their professional identities and reach out to public interest organizations to build their own potential collaborations. We've asked Kelly Yen, one of our 2021 fellows, to share more. Hello, I'm Kelly. This summer, I received the Pint Fellowship to work in Tanzania with an assistive device nonprofit called Kerro Assistive Tech. I worked on a variety of projects from designing a new logo to setting up a website to taking and editing photos for marketing materials. While in Tanzania, I also had the opportunity to immerse myself in communities that looked vastly different from those that I grew up in, I had to grapple with questions that I didn't know how to and continued to struggle to answer. With the language and cultural divide, how do I interact with people that I'm designing for in a way that's meaningful, respectful and inclusive? How do I know that my work is bringing the right value to these communities? And what do I do when my values aren't aligned with those of the communities I'm designing for? I came away from this summer with more questions about my career identity and values than I started this summer with. This school year, I'm helping organize and lead my college's public interest tech chapter as a way to continue to explore these questions and help provide a space for my peers to begin their own journeys in public interest tech as well. Every week, Sam convenes a call with the fellows that I join, and we discuss the experiences the fellows are having. Sometimes fellows describe situations and ask the group questions about workplace politics or the difficulty of communicating virtually with different stakeholders. Sometimes the fellows bring up profound questions about how an unexpected meeting or challenge has forced them to reevaluate their assumptions about what their work is really about and how they understand their professional identities or responsibilities. In addition to the mentorship fellows are getting formally or informally on the job, we really want our fellowship to explicitly offer mentorship on what it means to be a public interest technologist. I schedule one-on-one meetings with each of the fellows during the summer, asking them to prepare by identifying one or two significant takeaways they have had from their experience so far. And one or two questions they hope I might be able to help them think through in processing their experience or considering their next steps as public interest technologists. I remember in my conversation with Kelly, who gave me permission to say this, that she was realizing this summer that the type of work she does, whether engineering or design or whatever, is less important than the impact she can have. And although she was once most attracted to pursuing global impact on a big issue like climate change, she sees herself identifying more and more with creating local value, with really investing in a specific community. Students should be leading these experiences because we care deeply about our future public interest careers. Point student organizers used human-centered design practices to build the fellowship we would want to take part in. By building pathways into public interest work for other student technologists, I know that I have grown as a leader and built my organizing capacity. Point is different from other programs because it is student-led, and our incoming students see themselves clearly in us. As students, we understand how to make a competitive program like this fellowship inclusive and accessible, and we can support students in their own reflective journeys because their growth parallels our own. This is something that Olin does uniquely well. Our long history of undergraduate students as collaborators in developing curriculum, students taking ownership of their learning journeys, and emphasis on experiential learning, all together provides a strong foundation. However, we think other schools can adapt our approach and ensure that students are the vanguard of public interest technology on campus and in the world. We invite you to reach out to us and check out the pint website for more information. Sam and I and the rest of Pint are excited to share the application materials and process we have created for this student-run public interest tech fellowship program. And we are always eager to share stories about our fellows and the ways that they are helping shape the definition and future of public interest technology.