Being at IIT, it's really great to have
access to all of Chicago's offerings,
both in technology and beyond. We've had
access to 1871, the startup incubator,
we've had access to Chi Hack Night, a top
civic technology meetup in the city of
Chicago, and countless other
organizations that are designed to help
people of all ages learn more about
technology and how the city works.
Chicago is also a great city to study
computer science and data science
because the city government makes
unprecedent amounts of data publicly
available for anyone to work on, and
those have exposed us to a lot of rich
and nuanced challenges that go beyond
having better algorithms or better
computer systems and go into deep
questions about governance society and
all kinds of other topics. After
graduation I accepted an offer to work
as a software engineer at Google. I'll be
moving to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to
join the team there and work on projects
related to software engineering and
machine learning. I'm really excited because I
view that as a next step in learning
more about computer science and what it
means to be an engineer in
today's technology climate. Before I go
to Google I'll be working this summer as
part of the Civic Digital Fellowship.
It's a program that recruits college
students to work in a federal agency for
the summer, and I'll be part of a team at
the Bureau of Labor Statistics in D.C.
working on building models to automate
paperwork about occupational codes. I'm
really excited for that opportunity because
I'll be the only computer scientist
working on a team with economists,
statisticians, and psychologists. And
those are the kind of things that I'd
like to do going forward. I really want
to be involved in teams that are
multidisciplinary and that are working
on really difficult, really complex
problems that impact other humans, and I
hope that in the future I may be able to
join or start another young company that
still has time to define its culture, its
approach to solving problems, and how it
will be a responsible part of the
technology community.
