January 14, 2020 | By Matt Fortier

We’re excited to announce the Spring 2020 Student Analyst Cohort. They will play a critical role as they both learn about and contribute towards the Beeck Center’s mission of creating systems-level change for social impact. This semester’s cohort welcomes back seven analysts from previous semesters while introducing six new students. 

“The Beeck Center helps students expand their idea of what social impact opportunities look like, which is so important when considering future career paths.”

– Casey Doherty, College ’20

Every semester, Student Analysts work across our different portfolios: Fair Finance, Data + Digital, and Sustainable Student Impact, while helping us explore new areas of work such as Corporate Social Impact. The analysts take on key roles across the team, contributing new ideas, conducting research, managing projects, and supporting our operations, much of which you can see in our Student Analyst Capstone Showcase.

Our Student Analyst program embraces an experiential learning model where students learn to tackle real world problems in the social impact space, put theory to practice and work alongside staff and fellows, including seasoned social impact practitioners. This model is enhanced through a variety of programming, from skills-based workshops on public speaking and dialogue facilitation, to thought-provoking conversations in our Discern + Digest lunch series. Our goal is to provide a holistic education in social impact that enables students to develop their skills for social impact leadership and propel them towards a career that contributes towards the common good, in the spirit of Georgetown’s Jesuit tradition. 

“The Beeck Center does some of the most forward thinking and fascinating work on campus, and I’m so excited to join the center’s efforts. I find their approach of using the intersection of technology and social impact to inspire large scale social change both innovative and effective!

– Saumya Shruti, College ’20

To tackle the most complex challenges of our time, we require an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral approach. The 2020 cohort includes undergraduate and graduate students from six Georgetown schools and an even greater variety of majors, interests, and experiences. This rich diversity of skills and perspectives makes our Center stronger and creates an ideal learning environment in which we learn from each other as well as from the work itself. 

Students are a key audience of our work as we seek to develop future leaders for social impact. If you are interested in learning more about how you can contribute to the common good and learn about a cross-disciplinary approach to driving systems-level change for social impact, we invite you to engage with us and our work. Career opportunities with the Beeck Center can be found here and Student Analyst opportunities for Summer 2020 will open in February, so stay tuned! 

Below you’ll find some quick statistics on the 2020 Spring Student Analyst Cohort.

First Name	Last Name	Graduate Level	Year of Graduation	School	Major(s)	Minor(s)	Hometown	Portfolio Focus
Cristina	Alaniz-Ramirez	Graduate	2021	American University School of International Service (SIS)	Ethics, Peace and Human Rights : Concentration: International Economic Affairs	N/A	Brownsville, Texas	Fair Finance
Tyler Yat Long	Chan	Undergraduate	2021	COL	Economics	Sociology/Asian Studies	Las Vegas, NV	Fair Finance
Casey	Doherty	Undergraduate	2020	College	Government and American Studies	n/a	Charlton, NY	Student Engagement
Elaina	Faust	Graduate	2021	School of Foreign Service	Global Human Development	Social Innovation and Global Development	Southborough, MA	Data + Digital
Forrest	Gertin	Undergraduate	2020	SFS	International Political Economy	French	Rochester, NY	Student Engagement
Hayley	Pontia	Graduate	2020	Graduate School of Arts & Sciences	Communication, Culture, and Technology	NA	Pittsburgh, PA	Data + Digital
Justus	Pugh	Undergraduate	2020	MSB	Marketing	N/A	Chicago	Student Engagement
Taylor	Savell	Undergraduate	2020	School of Foreign Service	International Politics	Spanish; Economics	Nashville, TN	Data + Digital
Saumya	Shruti	Undergraduate	2020	COL	Government, Philosophy	N/A	San Ramon	Fair Finance
Cameron	Smith	Undergraduate	2020	College	Computer Science	N/A	Saratoga Springs	Data + Digital
Donovan	Taylor	Undergraduate	2020	McDonough School of Business	International Business and Management	n/a	Baltimore	Fair Finance
Audrey	Voorhees	Graduate	2020	Georgetown	Business Administration	Social Entrepreneurship	Des Moines, IOWA	Corporate Impact
Tongxin	Zhu	Graduate	2020	McCourt School of Public Policy	MPP	N/A	Guangdong, China	Fair Finance

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January 7, 2020

2020 is the last year of the millennium’s first decade (fight me), and promises to be an interesting one with a presidential election, Brexit, 50th anniversary of the start of the disco era, and whatever other surprises will surely arise.

We asked ourselves what we might see in the year ahead in the social impact space, here’s what we see in our crystal balls.

Impact at Scale Means Accelerating Movements

Today, scaling impact is too often conflated with scaling programs or organizations. No single program or organization, no matter how great it may be, can truly solve the complex social ills vexing the world. Rather it will take a coordinated effort across numerous sectors– from social ventures to policymakers to local social service providers. 

In 2020 and beyond, we’ll observe a sea change as funders and impact organizations alike tackle intractable social problems through a coordinated ecosystem lens rather than scaling pointed solutions in silos. Donor collaboratives like the Tipping Point Fund (a $12.5M coalition of nine foundations and family offices) and radical coordination like Imperative 21 (a business-led coalition of 72,000 businesses across 80 countries) will continue to increase as more investment in field building is needed to sustain the impact we want to see long-term. We believe grassroot efforts need to reach institutions where change can be more widely adopted and ultimately create the intended positive impact for all.

For the Beeck Center, that means playing the necessary role as a “grasstop” player, linking grassroot and institutional efforts poised for action, and putting our efforts toward the messy infrastructure work that can accelerate and sustain positive social impact movements.

– Nate Wong, Interim Executive Director 

Thoughts from Outside the Center

CEOs Will be Judged Both as Commercial Leaders and as Social Architects

It is clear the current dynamic business environment, combined with evolving social, economic, and political realities, the role of the CEO is transforming faster than many had expected for both public and private concerns. Specifically, CEOs are realizing the need to take more active and/or vocal roles around stakeholder issues such as healthcare, education and retraining, climate change, affordable housing and the like. The most effective and most successful CEOs for the near future will need to be both strong commercial leaders as well as courageous social architects to ensure that the community of stakeholders they serve is as engaged and productive as possible.

– Tierney Remick, Vice Chairman and Co-Leader, Board & CEO Services, Korn Ferry. 20 Predictions for Business & Society

Photo by Jenni Jones on Unsplash

Students Want a More Hands-On Approach to their Education

Experiential Learning will continue to play an increasingly prominent role in higher education, with further blending of the curricular and co-curricular in equipping students for careers in social impact.

The Beeck Center will continue to break down silos at Georgetown, accelerating collaboration across campus as we’ll work with different schools and student groups to better educate students for social impact leadership.

– Matt Fortier, Director, Sustainable Student Impact

Thoughts from Outside the Center

Rising Student Voice Will Prompt a Paradigm Shift among Professors

Today, students enter business school increasingly aware and concerned about the critical issues of our day. Faculty – charged with equipping these students with the context and skills to make responsible business decisions – will face louder questions about how the concepts they are teaching relate to issues like climate change and inequality.  These collective student voices will be hard to ignore, forcing faculty to make a conscious choice between teaching the seemingly discrete theories and models in the same siloed manner or exploring these challenging questions by looking at business concepts through a broader, more multi-faceted lens.

– Jaime Bettcher, Program Manager, Aspen Institute Business & Society Program, 20 Predictions for Business & Society

Photo by William Warby on Unsplash

A Demand for Results Means a Need for Tools to Measure Impact

We launched our Fair Finance initiative last year with the goal of righting the rules for shared prosperity, and we expect to see more partners engaged in our efforts as the year progresses.

Impact management practices and processes will converge as companies and investors increasingly look not only for measurable results, but for standard guidelines, commonly accepted tools and aligned frameworks to achieve positive and sustainable impact in communities.

If unemployment stays low, awareness of the need and opportunity to employ refugees and immigrants will increase.

The legislation that created Opportunity Zones (OZs) has only been in place for a short time, and as early movers begin to develop projects, more positive narratives about OZs will continue to emerge.

For us at the Beeck Center, we’ll bring together more of the key stakeholders in these areas as we convene our OZ Investor Council and complete a landscape analysis of workforce training opportunities for refugees and immigrants.

– Lisa Hall, Director, Fair Finance 

Thoughts from Outside the Center

Move Beyond Gender to Include Broader Diversity

Gender equality and the inclusion of women on boards and founding teams has been a big theme over the past year and will continue to be an important agenda item.

However, as more investors recognize that diversity translates into more representative, better informed teams, we’re likely to see a bigger drive to redefine diversity beyond gender alone.

When it comes to diversity, there is still a lot of work to do and we shouldn’t limit this scope to gender alone.

– Karma Impact: Top 10 Impact Investing Trends for 2020

 

Photo by Mitya Ivanov on Unsplash

Public Sector Workforce Grows Its Digital Skillset

In 2020 and beyond, data and technology will continue to drive the way our society builds systems and delivers services and we will need a workforce in the public interest and public sector—not just the private sector—that is equipped with the hard skills and policy expertise to leverage the tools of data and digital to deliver better outcomes. We need technologists in government to buy smarter so we don’t keep spending taxpayers dollars on software and products that vendors can’t or won’t deliver. We need technical skills at the policy making table in the public interest community and in government so major initiatives consider data opportunities and risks as well as tech implications in their design and also plan for rollout and implementation from the start. 

At the Beeck Center, I predict we will continue identifying ways that society can invest in the public interest technology community to ensure a workforce that meets our needs, and investing in projects and partnerships to drive forward the changing future we want to see. 

– Cori Zarek, Director, Data + Digital

Thoughts from Outside the Center

Companies Will Expand CSR to Include CDR

More and more companies will embed data responsibility principles into the way they do business — and embrace corporate data responsibility, or CDR. The acronym may be new, but in a digital world, it’s the logical next step for companies committed to meeting their responsibilities to individuals, one another and society as a whole. For the Center for Inclusive Growth that means leveraging Mastercard expertise, data, technology and philanthropy to help ensure the digital economy happens for people, not to them.

– Shamina Singh, Founder and President, Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, EVP, Sustainability, Mastercard, and member, Beeck Center Advisory Board, 20 Predictions for Business & Society

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In addition to our thoughts, here’s some of the predictions we’re seeing from outside our offices:

• The Aspen Institute: 20 Predictions for Business & Society
• Karma Impact: Top 10 Impact Investing Trends for 2020
• Forbes: 5 Corporate Social Responsibility Trends to Follow in 2020
• Deloitte: Government Trends 2020

This article was originally published in apolitical and is used with permission. Original article can be found here.

January 3, 2020 | By Hollie Russon Gilman

Many governments are experimenting with new ways of finding meaningful, sustainable avenues for channelling resident feedback and building civic engagement into decision-making. In other words, residents and government are finding new ways of working together for the benefit of all.

From working with public sector leaders across the globe — and in the Obama White House — it is clear to me that there is a need for building public sector capacity.

One recommendation is the creation of “civic fellowships” to enable fellows to not only flourish within government, but also equip people to work across sectors throughout their careers. By bringing residents together with real power, these programs can help maximize public good and public value.

It’s my conviction that these civic fellowships should work across multiple sectors, rather than only across government. The goal should be to create lifelong civic leaders, not fund limited-scope projects through short, time-bound appointments. Indeed, the importance of early career rotations as a way of developing key staff is increasingly recognized by governmental bodies.

Programs could equip public sector leaders with skills from across multiple industries, including technology, organizing, academia and philanthropy. Ideally, fellowships include multiple entry points to attract diverse talent experts at different levels in their career and offer them many different types of roles.

By allowing for rotations across many different types of jobs, we can engage new leaders across their careers. For example, we can enable people to serve a stint at a civic tech startup, as a community organizer, and then return for a career in local government — all the while with a strong group of mentors, on-ramps to public service and opportunities for learning new skills.

If done right, these programs could provide a more effective form of talent and expertise that helps the public sector govern better. In addition, civic fellowships would recruit people from a more diverse background to join public service across multiple levels, including local, state or regional.

As a result, a wider variety of expertise, skillsets and perspectives that often are excluded from governing are included in the policymaking process.

Rethinking how we work in government

Engaging more people in the process of governing requires a radically different view of what governmental expertise and personnel look like.

Governing with the community front and centre requires its own form of expertise: engaging with communities requires a wide range of linguistic, interpersonal and locally rooted skills. However, government has traditionally included people with privileged socioeconomic, educational, racial and legal status.

“Engaging more people in the process of governing requires a radically different view of what governmental expertise and personnel look like”

Any government department that commits to deepening democratic participation and sharing civic power will have to train and invest in existing staff, creating incentives and supports for learning new approaches. But they must also develop new creative ways to bring in a more locally rooted and diverse workforce, particularly through civic fellowships that have concerted outreach to marginalized communities, especially women and people of color.

In order for public servants to make policy that more aptly reflects community needs, the public sector needs to hire from the very communities it is serving.

It requires modifying the talent pipeline to be more diverse and more inclusive, so that more individuals from non-traditional backgrounds enter public service. And, crucially, rethinking the traditional recruitment that’s built on unpaid internships and often ignores students from community colleges.

It will also require building interdisciplinary thinkers who have practical expertise across many parts of society.

There is already a proven track record for a fellowship model that focuses a fellow’s time within one specific sector. One example includes the long-standing Presidential Management Fellows program, which tackles some of the same challenges to attracting early-career recruits to public service and offers the option for rotations across the federal government, as well as the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings external talent into the federal government.

Civic fellows would be offered opportunities that span across different sectors and multiple parts of the workforce, while maintaining a core commitment to giving back to the community and locally grounded public service. This enables insights from grassroots organizing, academia and civic technology, to name but a few areas, to be translated into public policy.

Effective civic engagement enables people from different sectors outside government to equip both fellows and public servants to learn from each other. It’s no surprise that the importance of early career rotations to developing key staff is increasingly recognized by governmental bodies.

The U.S. Department of State’s second Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which analyzes the impact of U.S. foreign development, included a recommendation for how the department could better invest in an “agile, skilled workforce”.

The review focuses on promoting workforce mobility, enabling employees to move between department bureaus, rotating between the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development, being detailed to other federal agencies or even taking sabbaticals from federal service into academia or the private sector.

As Tom Perriello, now executive director for U.S. Programs at Open Society Foundations, has said: “We’re managing people’s entire careers, not just managing them to the next tour.”

Fostering the next generation of leaders

Civic fellowships would also focus on developing lifelong civic leaders from residents who may not have originally considered public service.

To make these programs possible, new public service fellowships could be institutionalized and financed so that colleges, professional schools and vocational training facilities could frequently partner with philanthropists, organizers and bureaucrats to offer “residencies” that cultivate talent by exposing future organizers to government work and future bureaucrats to organizing and advocacy work.

For example, Harvard Business School’s Leadership Fellows program helps place recent graduates in meaningful public sector and social sector offices in local government. Harvard subsidizes part of the salary and provides mentorship opportunities.

Chris Osgood, who went on to co-found Boston’s New Urban Mechanics, began his work at city hall as a Harvard Leadership Fellow. The fellowship’s goals are to invest in leaders and to demonstrate the value of multi-sector or “tri-sector” expertise.

Unlike other business school fellowships that put a premium on business expertise and translating findings into profits, the goal of these civic fellowships is to create leaders who will remain place-based and tied to their communities. This requires gaining expertise outside of one’s existing academic and professional communities.

“The power of civic engagement is its ability to amplify perspectives and expertise not traditionally heard in government”

The power of civic engagement is its ability to amplify perspectives and expertise not traditionally heard in government. But fully realizing this power also means changing our democratic institutions.

Ultimately, civic fellows would provide greater equity inside the public sector and help to foster the next generation of public sector literacy with cross-sectoral skills.

Hollie Russon Gilman is a Beeck Center Fellow, fellow at New America’s Political Reform Program, and lecturer at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She is the co-author, with K Sabeel Rahman, of the new book Civic Power: Rebuilding American Democracy in an Era of Crisis. Follow her on Twitter.

Photo by Jonathan Simcoe on Unsplash

December 10, 2019 | By Ben Lang

For someone interested in working at the intersection of cities and data, I didn’t find a clear pathway for either classwork or experiential learning here at Georgetown, at first. There simply is no guide for students to work in cities and data unlike the vast amount of resources on social impact at a national level. 

To fill this gap, I researched these types of opportunities and interviewed expert practitioners in this field to create the basis of a resource guide for students like myself seeking to formulate a career path through data and impact in cities.

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“Lead your search with causes you’re passionate about, rather than working within data itself.”

– Natalie Evans Harris

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As a starting point, I visited Georgetown’s Cawley Career Center last year to better understand what to prioritize when choosing a career. They gave me good input and a helpful framework. That led to a summer internship in my hometown of Atlanta working at a nonprofit devoted to community investment, social impact, and the leadership of Downtown Atlanta.

This semester, I came to the Beeck Center, where I’m working with fellows and partners who have built their careers working in this exact area. Current fellow and former director of Enterprise Information for the City of New Orleans Denice Ross shared with me the importance of finding local leadership that values the same type of innovation as you do.

I’m also supporting fellow Natalie Evans Harris, a former Senior Advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer and data expert for the National Security Agency, as we finalize a guidebook on responsible data practices. Through the process, I’ve learned the importance of engaging the community and data stakeholders every step of the way to help drive impact. On a more specific level, she’s shared with me the importance of leading your search with causes you’re passionate about, rather than work within data itself. 

As expected, despite my hours of research and interviewing, I did not come up with a one-size-fits-all solution. Luckily, I was able to formulate a few best practices along with a basic framework of where students can enter the field at a local level. 

First, because at the local level you are directly engaging with a community, it is imperative to be aware of your own internal biases. Resources like “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and “Building Technology With, Not for Communities” are just the tip of the iceberg on the necessary perspectives to keep in mind when working inside any community. To effectively provide equitable solutions, we need to fully understand why and how data work will drive impact.

Second, we should try to find opportunities in impact that fulfill our own personal values before leading with data as a whole. Drawing on the framework I learned from Cawley to formulate my career path (prioritizing your values, interests, personality, and skills), if you do not recognize and pursue opportunities that engage all four categories, what you might gain in external recognition you will likely lack in personal drive. Additionally, the Beeck Center’s own Social Impact Navigator is a great tool for self-assessment before starting a career in social impact. 

With that in mind, here are three attainable ways for students and young professionals to get involved at the local level: 

• Getting involved with your local Code for America Brigade
  • In cities all across America, the brigades meet regularly to educate, discuss and create tools for local government and impact. Involving yourself with these opportunities allows you to network and grow on a professional and local level.
• Opportunities in city governments through data, technology, and innovation offices such as offices of CIOs, CTOs and CDOs
  • These offices of government provide the foremost opportunity to manage and use data for public impact from entry-level positions all they to the top. Moreover, outside of data offices, one can take advantage of data in many departments of local government like sustainability, transportation, and education.
• Careers at nonprofits and foundations like Downtown Improvement Districts (DID) and the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP)
  • Every city has different types of nonprofits, but most cities have organizations committed to data-driven approaches for government efficiency, community investment or simply data for the greater good. DID’s are tax-funded organizations that provide economic development and other services to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors. The International Downtown Association(linked above) is a national organization that helps organize these DIDs. The NNIP is another example of local nonprofits working to use data for the common good.

Working with local data gives people the opportunity to think creatively about new solutions without suffering from as many bureaucratic issues at the national or even state level. One can look to examples from Broward County and New Orleans to see the fantastic innovation done at the local level. This research provides a brief introduction to the important and extensive opportunities for students and professionals to engage with data at a local level and drive impact. 

In the future, I look forward to pursuing opportunities in my hometown to help Atlanta run as effectively, equitably, and efficiently as possible. For me, this means actively searching for roles that balance data and service. While I cannot say specifically what this will lead to, I can already see a more defined framework of paths to follow as I go into my final three semesters at Georgetown and begin the job hunt. 

Ben Lang is a Fall 2019 Student Analyst at the Beeck Center studying Economics and German in the Georgetown College. Contact him at bel46@georgetown.edu or follow him on Twitter at @blang716.

November 20, 2019 | By Robert Roussel 

A great idea is a terrible thing to waste, and people do it all the time. 

In academia and policy institutions, research is often regarded as a key analytical asset. However, research alone has limited utility. Research needs to be resourced with practices and structures in order for that research to be activated, iterated upon, and deployed. Failing to do so shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of research—a failure to understand that research is a means and not an end. This approach begins with how we train students and I worry that, all too often, academic training has entrenched problematic approaches to teaching aspiring professionals what the value of research actually is.

I went to graduate school to learn how to evaluate and implement public policies, which, at the end of the day, was about translating statistics and analysis into writing. My peers and I considered writing both our biggest pain point and our most powerful asset. I was reminded of this recently as I sorted through old papers and memos to pick a writing sample when applying for a job that would, in part, pay me to write. I started remembering all of the topics and arguments I had so eloquently and passionately inked onto a digital page. Undeniably, my graduate program taught us how to write and think logically and persuasively but as I perused my hard drive for old papers, I could not shake the feeling that my new ‘ideal’ job at a think tank — the one I’ve been wanting for years — would relegate my writing to a fate similar to my academic exercises: gathering dust, and longing for eyeballs.

To businesses and consultancies, the idea that research without applications is useless is obvious. In academia, this culture is not always the norm. At Georgetown, I had the privilege of practicing valuable quantitative and analytical skills through thoughtful exercises led by experts in their fields. Even at this institution, however, I couldn’t help feeling that some professors often seemed quite willing to ignore the need for a more applied approach to teaching, tacitly implying that an efficient division of labor within the policy-making ecosystem would translate our clever and thoughtful words into action.

Researchers in academic settings need to be rewarded for being consulted by policy makers, not cited by fellow researchers.

Researchers in academic settings need to be rewarded for being consulted by policy makers, not cited by fellow researchers. Even when professors were practitioners themselves, their in-class behaviors often failed to reflect that fact. It seems more likely than not that this approach is not just borne out of convenience, but a culture rooted in academic tradition. Though universities like to talk big about their cutting-edge research, often their approaches to pedagogy seem remarkably risk-averse. Academic culture is very slow to change, and the incentives for taking such a large departure are just not there. This culture shift will likely need to occur from the bottom-up, as students demand to be more involved in the activation of research—meaning that any education should be as much about writing words as it is about resourcing those words in clever intentional ways that help, rather than hope, words to translate to actions and actions translate to impact.

How to ‘Activate’ Research: A Brief Case Study

During my time at the Beeck Center, I noticed that the leadership was placing a lot of emphasis on activities other than research, such as convenings, workshops, interviews, or meetings. One of my projects was to design a framework and resource repository for establishing responsible data-sharing practices for social impact. Many third-party organizations have emerged to help facilitate data-sharing for social impact but the resources for sharers and the bandwidth of these facilitators are limited. From the start, it was clear this research was just a launching point and not the end product. We were also going to build a community around this research product that would help activate it and keep it alive, constantly open to change as new best practices and case studies emerge. To me, this approach — one that is both highly collaborative and constantly seeking input — is exactly the way we should be approaching public problems.

One of the most often given pieces of advice is that people should spend 99% of their time understanding the problem and that, if working this way, finding a solution should be so obvious that it takes just the remaining 1% to solve. If that is true, we need to be extra sure that we are solving the right problem or else our deployed solution might not be all that useful. The cleverness of keeping the Beeck Center’s data-sharing guidebook ‘alive’ was that it made the guidebook both a solution and a problem exploration process at the same time. Certainly, it aimed to create a solution to a problem but its openness serves as a way to constantly re-evaluate this solution. That malleability and that openness to collaborate is what will activate the research in the guidebook.

This is a smart approach to making sure that research is activated, but it might not go far enough. With the resources and bandwidth of stakeholders being limited, there are clearly gaps in capacity that limit the scalability of this project. While being careful of the hubris of applying a ‘there’s an app for that’ mentality to complex social problems, I proposed a solution that can help activate the guidebook and resource guide. This solution was borne out of a seemingly impossible trade-off between brevity and usefulness. A shorter guidebook would have recommendations that are more digestible but would have to be more generic, and by extension, not useful beyond a surface level. 

My answer, which is an answer I urge researchers facing problems of activation to consider, is a customizable tool (a ‘wizard’, if you remember Windows ’98) that creates unique guidebooks and resource-repositories for each ‘bin’ of users, reflecting the variety of resources, motivations, and barriers or different stakeholders. When it comes to translating research into action, this approach would significantly help constrained organizations that may not have the resources to discover new approaches wade through the literature and see how it might apply to them.

Advice for Policy Students and Researchers

Seen in the most generous of lights, writing academic papers and memos is training for conducting professional research in the real world. I fear, however, that many students will trip on these bad habits as they enter the professional research world—and that those worlds are comprised of ex-students with similar tendencies. With so many vital issues facing the social sector, we need to be sure that our research efforts build out our ability to generate actionable recommendations and tangible impact. A relevant internship or part-time job while in school could be one possible step forward here, but many students complain that their time is spent on passive class assignments and papers that remain all too often unread and unused. Opportunities that give students a real taste of what it is like to see research applied are lacking — and this is a role that academia needs to fill. In my opinion, applied graduate programs should be thoroughly experiential, matching students with real clients in real teams to solve real problems. Across the country, universities are experimenting with this model, but this new approach is a heavy lift and would require a major revamping of the tenure model — an unlikely proposition in many settings.

Unlike coursework, research doesn’t end when a paper is handed to a superior. If you believe that, by handing someone a memo, you have just handed that person everything they need to know for them to get the job done, you are likely mistaken. You dove deep and you need to be intimately involved in applying that research. The term policy maker is a catch-all term and its vagueness makes it rather difficult to understand when the research stops and the policy creation begins. I urge policy students to reject the suspicions borne out of the structure of their academic program that see a clear demarcation between these two fields. Only when we are deeply involved in a project from ‘start’ to ‘finish’ can we effectively suggest action that is researchable and create research that is actionable.

Don’t let your great ideas gather dust in the cloud; have them gather stardust.

 

Robert Roussel was a student analyst at the Beeck Center in Summer 2019. He is a 2019 graduate of the Georgetown University McCourt School for Public Policy and is currently working at Accenture Federal Services as a tech analyst.

November 15, 2019 | By Casey Doherty

Georgetown students are encouraged to be “people for others.” We are taught to give back to our communities and jump into social impact work. Here at the Beeck Center, we conceptualize social impact as looking at how the current system affects people, and focusing on how to improve that impact through a systems-level approach.

You might know you want to make a difference. However, it can be difficult to identify the best space in which to work on honing your strengths and areas for development in the social impact sphere. In my experience, Georgetown seems decentralized – so many organizations are doing amazing work, but they are isolated from each other. It’s daunting to discern which opportunity would be best for you, both in terms of the value you can add to the organization, and the skills you will gain from joining the venture. Hoyas care deeply about “making a difference” in their communities but many students don’t know where to begin. 

A critical step in the process is developing a self-awareness of one’s strengths and areas for development, enabling intentionality in these decisions. The Beeck Center is working to make this process easier. The team I am a part of created a tool called the Social Impact Navigator, which helps students navigate their social impact journey. Students complete a self assessment, then we help them identify programs at the Beeck Center that will hone their strengths and improve their development. Over time and through collaboration, we’re looking to share this tool with programs across Georgetown and beyond. 

The Social Impact Navigator identifies the six skills critical for effective social impact leadership. 

Growth Mindset: Leaders must have a growth mindset that enables them to appreciate complexity, creatively embrace challenges, see opportunity where most others see dead-ends, and take risks with an experimental attitude. 

Relentless Learning: Leaders must be lifelong learners. Driven by their relentless pursuit of knowledge, leaders go beyond building the cognitive skills necessary to execute their ideas and eagerly pursue opportunities to grow their knowledge base and adapt to our changing world.

Self-Awareness and Courage: Leaders constantly work on building their self-confidence and courage, balanced with humility, so that they are prepared to act when others hesitate. Self-aware and courageous leaders take initiative, whether or not the path is conventional, to change a system for the better. 

Influential Collaboration and Communication: To ensure the sustainability of their ideas, leaders must trust others. Leaders must have the flexibility to work in multidisciplinary teams, communicate across sectors, mobilize diverse groups of people, and inspire them to work together towards a common goal. Working across differences and actively seeking new perspectives is critical for savvy and effective social impact leadership.

Empathetic Problem Solving: Leaders must be willing to listen, withhold judgment and acknowledge preconceived notions. They must empathize with people to better understand the underlying root-cause of a challenging situation. Once empathetic leaders have fully understood a problem, they can then develop and implement a solution that serves the common good.

All of the above-mentioned skill areas make for a great leader, but this final skill is what makes a social impact leader:

Discernment: Leaders take time to reflect on how their actions align with their purpose and most deeply held values. This discernment lights their path and ensures that no matter the problem or sector, they never lose sight of the common good. 

I wonder what paths I would have followed if I’d had this tool when I arrived as a first-year student. As a senior, I see all of the opportunities to engage in the social impact space both on and off-campus, and with some guidance on connecting my skills and strengths to existing impact programs and organizations, I could have begun my social impact journey earlier. I am excited to release this tool to the student body and watch all the amazing things Hoyas are able to accomplish.

The Social Impact Navigator program is starting here at the Beeck Center, but our goal is to expand its use through adoption and collaboration, bringing it to scale. We want to share our knowledge of how to navigate the social impact space and equip social impact leaders everywhere with the tools needed to create positive change. 

Casey Doherty is a student analyst at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, studying Government and American Studies at Georgetown University. Connect with her on email at cgd43@georgetown.edu.

November 11, 2019 | By Tongxin Zhu

“I’ve only been cooking for myself and my husband for over 10 years since my sons moved to Canada. It really amazed me when the team first came to me and said that I can work as a chef to showcase our local cuisine and pastry.” Madam Xie told me when I was helping clean up after lunch during my tourism geography fieldtrip in Candong Village, Kaiping City. 

Majoring in Tourism Planning as an undergrad, I had plenty of experience working with local communities and government on tourism planning and renovation projects. I found myself interested in connecting with local people and hearing their stories. The case that motivated me the most to pursue community development is my field trip and volunteer experience in a heritage tourism village – Cangdong Village in Kaiping City, China. 

The village itself was almost empty before the renovation project happened, with about 50 elder residents who didn’t want to move overseas with younger generations – Madam Xie is one of them since her husband is the village head. Led by a professor at a local university, a group of architecture students came to the village and engaged residents to renovate the historic buildings. They rebuilt an ancestral temple and other public areas based on residents’ oral history and current needs. Residents were encouraged to work as chefs, handicraft makers and most commonly, storytellers, to share the village history to tourists and the younger generation. 

The renovated village attracted over 400 overseas Chinese during the 2017 Chinese New Year and helped to build connections between multiple generations. When compared with another heritage village in the same city, Cangdong Village surpassed expectations in the sense of keeping a living memory of the village and building connections between people and community. Other heritage villages in comparison were managed by a tourism company and barely profited by charging an entrance fee.

I joined the Beeck Center with the expectation to learn similar cases in the local-level development program. I hope to start my own local-level development program back home after graduation. I used to be confused about the different paths that I could take. Between small scale, instant influence such as the renovation project that I participated in, and the longer-term, systematic level change that can provide broader influence. like what the Beeck Center is trying to achieve through Fair Finance, Data + Digital, and Student Engagement initiatives. 

My experience at the Beeck Center changed my views on social impact to a great extent. The Beeck Center has a unique approach to scaling impact – acting as a grasstop organization that accelerates change through collaborations with ecosystem players. Local-level, instant changes can be encouraging and create a sense of fulfillment when the programs work, but they can also be discouraging if I’m feeling self-contented or meet some uncontrollable contextual changes. 

Take my work here in Opportunity Zones as an example, I might deep dive into a project for several years to achieve significant impact in one O-Zone, but there are over 8,700 of them facing different challenges across the country. Therefore, a small-scale approach might not be the most effective way when dealing with big social problems. On the other hand, back into reality, not all local voices could be heard or taken into account in decision making. Therefore, there is a real need for holistic change since the system hasn’t fully discovered the value of its people and enabled them to reach their potentials.

Systematic changes always take time, and it is discouraging to see people criticizing Opportunity Zones making the “ultra-rich even richer while those in need end up worse-off. From my perspective, this is the trade-off between type 1 error and type 2 error in statistics. If too much effort and restrictions are put to limit the types of investors and investment in O-Zones, there is a larger probability that people who would have benefited from some investment – either getting a job or living in a mixed-income community – would no longer be able to get that positive outcome. Thankfully, I hear and see impact investing stories happening both inside and outside the OZ landscape. With the present level of data collection and impact evaluation tools, I think it would be much easier to make an evidence-based conclusion on the impact of OZ in the near future and make timely adjustment if needed.  We also need policymakers to think about the unintended consequences and possible solutions while moving on these issues. That helps me keep faith in what I’m doing, and excited for what’s to come. 

 

Tongxin Zhu is a student analyst at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, studying Public Policy at Georgetown University. Connect with her on Twitter/email at tz163@georgetown.edu.

November 4, 2019 | By Grace Rector

“Do you take your privilege and use it to the best of your ability and/or do you use your privilege to make way for others?” That was the question one of our fellows, Sheila Herrling, presented to me and the other Beeck Center student analysts for our weekly Discern + Digest conversation. As we sat around the table trying to unpack what privilege means and whether it is demeaning to use your privilege to give voice to another person with a less privileged background, we talked about representation in politics and whether someone should or can truly support a specific population without sharing their identity. We discussed these implications within the social impact space when organizing projects and how to support a community without claiming authority. Taking the space to ask what is on my mind and really struggle with questions is one of the ways the Center fully engages students and provides tools of learning beyond just a job.

History

Historically, the Beeck Center hosted weekly Brown Bag discussions in which a speaker from the social impact space came to speak to the student analysts about their experiences and to share their expertise. These lunches were very informative to students including myself, but it could be very one-sided; the knowledge resided alone in the mind of the guest speaker while the students asked questions about how to get the job that the guest held.

Our current Interim Executive Director, Nate Wong, and the Director of Student Engagement, Matthew Fortier identified this issue and desired to use this time every week to hold a more impactful conversation rather than coffee chat. I was grateful to be invited into their brainstorming process, and together we created the Discern + Digest program. The goal was to create a brave space for student analysts in which they could ask questions that they are struggling with within the social impact arena and use their peers’ experiences to digest these questions more fully, serve the needs of the student analysts and allow them to develop as individuals. 

The Beginning

In Spring 2019, we launched the Discern + Digest Series to the Beeck Center student analysts as well as a group of external undergraduate and graduate Georgetown students interested in social impact. We kicked off the series by gathering together as a community to list all possible questions that students have encountered or struggled with during their interactions with social impact in order to see where the interests of the group lay. Another important step we took as a group before beginning the discussions was establishing group rules; we established that Discern + Digest is a space where students can feel confident sharing difficult stories or experiences, where every experience is valuable, and where one can question the idea, not the person. These ground rules are important to set in order for a vulnerable and meaningful conversation to take place.

For our first official discussion, Nate shared his experience from his time in Mozambique that prompted the question, “Whose role is it to align perception in reality?” He shared his story for 15 minutes, then we opened the discussion up to the students. Students discussed race, privilege, allyship, and more in the mere 50 minutes that we had together, but it was so powerful to see the students sharing their experiences and asking why certain structures exist in society. Other questions we discussed throughout the semester included:

1. Is international development driven by nonprofits’ wants or the community’s needs?
2. How do you stay rooted while trying to change the system?
3. How to move beyond diversity and create inclusive spaces?
4. How to serve yourself to better serve others?

Feedback

These weekly discussions became the highlight of my week because I looked forward to learning from my peers and because I felt comfortable sharing my thoughts and concerns in that space. I devoted my time at the Beeck Center during this semester to the development and flourishment of Discern + Digest and I was overwhelmed by the positive feedback we received from participants. One student reflected on the series:

“I loved the questions that we never seemed to unravel, especially ones that spoke of diversity and inclusivity. Feeling unresolved at the end, with more questions than answers, was a mark of success for me throughout the series.” (Anonymous participant)

This comment was a mark of success for me too because this student walked away feeling comfortable with the many questions they gained during the experience. I often find at Georgetown that we value knowledge over curiosity, and while both are important, I feel the curiosity is lacking, and it makes me happy to know such a space exists for students thanks to the Beeck Center. Another student shared, “this concept should be part of every GU program!” This comment is very reassuring and makes me feel the Center has created a space for students to feel supported. 

Other important results we gathered include the fact that 91% of participants felt that “By digging beneath the surface, I’ve uncovered questions that I hope to continue exploring.”

This means the experience added something to the participants’ lives, and lit a spark from which the students will continue to explore. Additionally, 72% of participants who answered the survey agreed or strongly agreed that “the discussions have deepened my understanding of the social impact space.” 

While the goal of this space is to create curious and innovative 21st-century thinkers, it also aims to educate students about social impact and its role in modern society.

Personal Impact

Not only do I hope the Discern + Digest series impacted the student analysts and outside students, but I know that facilitating and organizing this project has significantly affected me. Nate helped me obtain the tools necessary to be a great facilitator who listens and moves the conversation based on the flow of the group. I met with the guest speakers before they would come in to formulate a question encompassing the topics we wanted to address and ensure that the conversation was accessible to all students. I learned how to be a good facilitator and obtained so many new questions that I continue to ask myself regularly including, “how to serve yourself to better serve others.” 

Through my experience in Discern + Digest, I came to love listening to the stories and experiences of others; I found it fascinating how one’s experiences can impact the way one interacts with everything else in their life. Accordingly, I was grateful to serve as the storytelling intern for Women for Women International this summer (2019) through the Beeck Center’s GU Impacts program. I worked with the young women beneficiaries of the organization to listen to their stories and to share it with Women for Women’s networks. I felt prepared in my work because I had learned so much about interpersonal skills and listening skills during my time facilitating the Discern + Digest series. 

This fall, I am studying comparative education and social change in Chile and Argentina, and I was looking for a space in which I could find something similar to the community I had at the Beeck Center. I found the American Space, co-funded by the U.S. Embassy and the National Institute of Chile, in which they have regular conversations for Chileans and anyone else who wants to join about cultural issues such as women’s rights or the local job market. I plan to get involved by facilitating a conversation on the comparative role of women in Chile and the United States, and I am grateful to the Discern + Digest series for awakening curiosity within me and for giving me the bravery to seek out innovative spaces outside of the Beeck Center.

How YOU can get involved

The Discern + Digest series has proven to be an innovative and supportive space for students at Georgetown University, but I strongly believe that curiosity and dialogue is scarce everywhere in our country: in universities, workplaces, the government, and more. Accordingly, if you are involved in an organization where you  feel that you could benefit from regular discussions about questions related to social impact and social justice, I implore you to create your own Discern + Digest Series according to the following steps:

Step 1: Goal setting for the discussion series

1. What is the purpose of creating this space?
2. How is it different from pre-existing discussion spaces?

Step 2: Identify a facilitator

1. Who will best ensure the aforementioned goals of this series?
2. Who has the time to dedicate to ensuring the discussions are well organized and well thought out?
3. Who has excellent people skills and can articulate the goals and objectives of the series?

Step 3: Identify participants

1. What students would most benefit from this experience?
2. How many students should be included in the discussion?
3. How diverse should the group be in regards to experiences and backgrounds?

Step 4: Establish ground rules

1. What are the necessary rules to ensure a safe and brave space for participants?
2. Are these rules agreed upon by every participant?

Step 5: Select guest speakers and work with them to create interesting questions

1. Who would bring a unique perspective on the question they want to share?
2. Will the guest speaker be a facilitator in the discussion rather than dominate the conversation?
3. Is the question dynamic and engaging for a wide array of people?

Step 6: Enjoy and learn!

1. Open your ears and hearts and take advantage of this opportunity to learn from the experiences of the diverse group in the room.
2. Find ways to incorporate the goals of this space into daily life so that the impact is sustainable.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Beeck Center’s Discern + Digest series, or participating in one of our sessions, please contact Matt Fortier, Director of Student Engagement.

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Grace Rector is a Junior in the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, studying Culture and Politics with a concentration in global education and a minor in Education, Inquiry, and Justice. Connect with her via email at gr455@georgetown.edu or follow her blog globalgracegazette.wordpress.com.

September 10, 2019 | By Jillian Gilburne and Dennese Salazar

Student Analysts Jillian Gilburne and Dennese Salazar produced the report How to Get Started in Public Interest Tech: Recommendations for Recruiting Early-Career Tech Talent. The following is an edited version of their findings.

There is a point in every college student’s academic career when they begin to wonder what it’s all for…. It might be the sense that using a freshly minted computer science degree to perform A/B testing on app interfaces feels soul sucking — or they can’t get past the cognitive dissonance of using their design chops to help kids make healthier school lunch choices one day while designing marketing materials for a fast food empire the next. 

While we know this sounds dramatic, it comes from personal experience. In joining the Beeck Center this summer, we realized that we had the opportunity to use our newly obtained knowledge and networks to highlight opportunities for careers in public interest technology and design that combined technical skills with social good. 

While some experts have indicated that the public interest technology movement is currently going through its “tween years,” when tasked with designing a research capstone of our own, we wanted to take on a topic that would be important for the sustainability of this field through its adolescence and into its adulthood — the recruitment of young technologists into public interest and public sector jobs. We wanted to create a project that would allow us to focus on how to better assist early-career job seekers interested in civic tech and government service design positions. 

Much like the popularization of “public interest law” in the 1960s and ’70s, the possibility of a career in “public interest technology” is rapidly winning over the hearts and minds of university students seeking to make an impact in their professional lives. However, in the status quo, many recent graduates are encouraged to start their careers in the private sector and circle back to government after they have gained some experience through the tour of civic service fellowship models offered by the Presidential Innovation and Management fellowships, TechCongress fellowships, Code for America fellowships, New Sector RISE fellowships, or other similar programs. While many before us have found this to be a totally fulfilling pathway, we know that the government’s need for technical skills is rapidly outpacing this approach. And we also know that entry-level job seekers like us don’t necessarily want to start in the private sector and come in through a fellowship — we’re looking for careers we can start and grow in these great civic organizations. 

According to a 2017 NextGov Survey, there are four times as many government IT specialists over the age of 60 as there are under 30. In California, 38% of current Government IT employees are at retirement age or will be within five years. While recruiting top tech talent requires government agencies to compete with well-resourced private sector recruitment teams, organizations like Coding it Forward have proven that younger generations have a strong interest in using their technical skills for good. 

The Design Challenge

Faced with a problem as nebulous and multi-faceted as rethinking the way early-career technologists are recruited into public interest and public sector roles, we started by breaking the project into smaller pieces. We outlined our project objectives, stakeholder and assumption maps, and research methods, and conducted hours of precedent research and interviews with representatives from Code for America, the New America Public Interest Technology University Network, Design Gigs for Good, the team that runs the federal government’s employment website USAJOBS, and the Georgetown University Cawley Career Center. After learning more about the issue area and synthesizing our research, we broke our findings into six major problems facing early career professionals wanting to pursue a civic technology or digital services career:

Major problems our research and interviews surfaced based on the status quo for early-career job seekers who are interested in public interest technology. 

To address these problems, we came up with three phased approaches that includes focusing on changes with job boards, career centers, and government teams.

First We Started with the Job Boards

Recognizing that the government hiring process was not something that we could fix overnight, we decided to focus our project on stakeholders who we had access to and who had some degree of agency over their piece of the puzzle.

We started with job boards since they are an obvious entry point for newcomers starting their civic tech journey. Our research was prompted by the belief that job boards can be doing more to orient potential recruits and build up interest in the absence of well-resourced public sector recruitment strategies. After a series of interviews with public interest job board managers and user-experience research with ourselves and other job seekers, this is what we found: 

Context

A major barrier facing the public interest technology recruitment pipeline is that new job seekers often lack context for what their future career might look like. While resources and university partnerships have been developed by organizations like Code for America and New America, newcomers don’t always know where to find them or that they exist. Given that job boards are often the most public facing and frequently used pages for some of these organizations, we believe that they can function as translators between public interest and public sector tech organizations and new job seekers.

Representation

As entry-level people begin their career searches, location and work environment often have major influence on the decision-making process. The existing Code for America job board and the data science microsite on USAJOBS have an emphasis on featuring civic technologists with diverse backgrounds, which we greatly appreciated, but we also want job boards to emphasize geographic diversity. Currently, many of these job boards recruit predominantly from large cities, like San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C. While the geographical distribution of jobs is a larger and more complex issue than we could address in a few weeks, we believe that job boards should be doing more outreach to organizations and local governments in smaller, less well-represented cities.

Pathways

A common misconception that students and entry-level job seekers have is that their career journeys have to be linear. This belief makes the blurred boundaries of public interest and public sector technology especially overwhelming. Because there are so many ways to use technical skills in government or to support public interest projects, there is no formal “pipeline” or “pathway” for newcomers to follow. To combat this, we are proposing that job boards create “are you new here?” pop-ups with links to resources, instructions for access online civic tech communities, and fellowship opportunities.   

Toward the end of July, as we carried out an ideation sticky-note session, we began to think about overarching recommendations that would aid job seekers. Photo by Dennese Salazar. 

Then We Consulted with the Career Centers

Through our interviews with the New America Public Interest Technology Network and the Georgetown Cawley Career Center we realized that civic tech barriers start earlier than interactions with job boards. As a current student and recent graduate, we have had firsthand exposure to the discrepancies between public and private university recruitment strategies, and we know that a handful of professors do most of the labor when it comes to providing civic tech specific advice and resources to students. To better understand the design opportunities within the university context, we mapped out our own journeys into this space and made note of the pain points where we could have benefited from clearer guidance. 

In order to better understand how we could help university students access the civic tech space, we mapped out our own experiences to identify pain points.

 

The final product was a “How to Get Started in Public Interest Tech” guide, designed to introduce, entice, and break down what we think a student would need to get started. 

We used recruitment materials from a dozen different civic tech and digital service organizations to put together a list of the most common civic tech roles, scraped 91 job postings on Code for America’s job board using an open source word analytics software to put together the most frequently requested skills, and interviewed current practitioners to develop a better understanding of what civic tech work looks like and the pathways to it. 

Our goal was to not only make something that a student could understand, but also a guide that faculty or career service professionals could use to recommend public interest technology to their students. 

This is a subsection of our student guide that maps out some of the thematic takeaways we learned during our summer working on civic tech at the Beeck Center. 

And Finally, we Pitched to Government

We know that we are not the first people to take on this project — in recent years, the Office of Personnel Management redesigned USAJOBS, the White House proposed a legislative plan to overhaul federal HR services, and the organization Coding it Forward has placed young tech talent across federal agencies during the past three summers. However, based on the insights and recommendations we collected throughout our research, we have compiled a list of changes that we believe governments could make to help early-career tech professionals find their way into public service. 

First, we think that government agencies should take a cue from recruitment techniques used by the private sector. This could include resume books, which are collections of resumes compiled by a university based on a particular semester and industry that are then sent to employers seeking employees. This would shift the burden of reaching out to desirable applicants to government hiring managers, but also the likelihood of agencies finding a perfect fit. Or increased career fair presence at universities across the country, to ensure that the public sector is able to establish relationships with top talent. This method would include thinking more intentionally about how to convince young people that working in the government will help them to hone their skills and develop new qualifications. Given the skyrocketing cost of tuition and student loan debt, extending federal scholarship programs to tech, design, and management degrees might also help the government agencies compete with the allure of Silicon Valley. 

Second, there are a number of reforms that could be enacted during the hiring process. This could include creating direct hiring permissions for technologists and designers across the agencies — this model has already been tested to recruit short-term cybersecurity experts. This process is not commonly practiced in the status quo due to its complexity and human resources offices with various agencies not knowing of its existence. While more research and clarity is needed, our hypothesis is that this shift would make the recruitment process faster, ensure that those who understand the requirements of the job have more of a say, and bring in temporary hires who could prove the value of a more long-term hiring strategy for technical talent. We also think that developing microsites like the USAJOBS pages for data science and cybersecurity could help to provide specific direction for federal job seekers with in-demand technical skills, and might be a model for further standardizing job posting language across agencies.

What’s next?

For us, taking on this problem through our capstone was deeply personal. During our summer on the Beeck Center’s Data + Digital team, we have been exposed to an innovative and diverse community of technologists and do-gooders who are working to hack and bootstrap our democracy. They work across different sectors, on different topics, and came to this line of work and this community in a multitude of different ways. 

Our capstone project as part of Beeck’s Digital Service Collaborative, an effort in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, has been working to support unification efforts to increase idea sharing and mentoring across a decentralized public interest technology ecosystem, and we hope it will contribute to the ongoing efforts to reduce barriers of entry for university students and early-career professionals. We know that this work is instrumental to the sustainability of the civic tech community in the long term, and we look forward to a future where young technologists seeking out government positions is the norm. 

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Dennese Salazar was a Summer 2019 Student Analyst supporting the Data + Digital team who recently graduated from Brown University. 

Jillian Gilburne was a Summer 2019 Student Analyst supporting the Data + Digital team and will return to Northwestern University this fall where she will be a senior majoring in Communication Studies, Political Science, and Human-Centered Design. Follow her on Twitter @JillianGilburne.