About Hi, I'm Ella.

Following my graduation from Clark, I took a position as a Software Engineering Fellow with the United States Digital Corps. USDC is a full-time 2 year early-career technologist opportunity to create a government that better serves the American public. The intent of the program is to place each fellow at an agency working on high-impact projects to improve the digital maturity of government services. At the time I begun, I was very excited to be joining a supportive community that was focused on and aligned with my values of more accessibility and diversity in the tech field.

I was placed on a team at the United States Geological Survey, within their Water Mission Area. In my time there, I have worked on internet water data portals, including the Water Quality Portal and the National Groundwater Monitoring Network to serve data about our nation's water resources, products that are often used by researchers, scientists, environmentalists, as well as politicians to shape our nation's regulations and policies. My work as a full-stack engineer, on a small team with two other developers, has helped me learn a lot, and develop as a technologist in my first post-grad role. My tasks range from frontend UI updates, to website architecture and design modernization efforts, to research on technology options, and leading and designing a cloud deployment processes with AWS CDK. Working in civic tech often means navigating legacy tech stacks, and years of code being built upon outdated code and system styles, and I quickly became adept at navigating and leading development on the various projects, their stacks, and the quirks that came with their system design.

In addition to my work at USGS, the fellowship has a huge focus on prioritizing our individual growth, both professionally and personally, something I can attest to from my time. With regular learning and development sessions, supporting individual learning, and opportunities to explore other interests, I have found myself constantly learning and working with my peers on different issues. This includes working groups I joined, and time spent researching and presenting on topics like the history of healthcare policy in the US from the colonial era to today, to cross-track (between engineers, product managers, cybersecurity analysts, and designers) collaboration to explore solutions to improve communications between the government and the public. My time in this role has been invaluable for my development professionally and personally. Working for the American public in this way has been an honor, something I have loved to do, and an opportunity I am beyond grateful to have.

My Fields

Why I Do What I Do

The first comment I often get after being asked where my interests lie is "huh, computer science and political science are completely unrelated."

While at first glance, computer science and political science seem to share no similarities, at a closer look, like many things, connections can be drawn. I am interested in cybersecurity topics of data privacy, cyber law, and cyber warfare. In political science, I am interested in voter rights, government procedures, and legal justice. As our world becomes increasingly more online, those issues of cybersecurity become more prevalent in our politics and will begin to affect the rights of individuals.

Throughout my time in university, I was able to combine my interests in my research and projects, analyzing political data through programs I designed, and discussing the impact of the cyber laws we have so far, and how they need to be adapted as technology advances. My research involved analyzing the data privacy regulations of various international organizations, as well as the impacts AI has had and will continue to have on US national security concerns and international, global relations.

Though my work experience since graduating has been much more technical focused, as a Software Engineer, I still find myself getting to apply my political science knowledge and interests more than people likely expect. Whether it be the implications for the products I work on being funded or mandated by Congress, the limitations of the federal budget, or regulations I have to follow as a government employee, I typically am affected and thinking of policies every day. Beyond that, as part of the educational nature of the fellowship program, I am able to pursue topics outside of my specific role, often getting to put my political science expertise to use, for instance researching and presenting on the history of healthcare policy in the US to a group of my fellow Fellows in a working group, putting my research and policy analysis skills into practice.

Thinking beyond my current role in software engineering, I am passionate and interested in joining the tech policy/digital governance space. While in undergrad I learned about the field while trying to find ways to combine my two majors, and quickly became invested in learning all I could about it. This led to my research on data privacy regulations and national security and AI. My time in government has only solidified this, I see the effects of policies and lack of policies. I see how critical digital technologies are in providing effective public services, and I want to be involved in regulating these so we can provide better, more effective, efficient, equitable, and safer services to our public. I hope to pivot away from a technical role and move to policy analysis, working at the international level to understand how states can work multilaterally on global governance around technology issues (whether this be AI regulation, data privacy, safety concerns, equitable access, or whatever new issues crop up as the technology continues to evolve). I see many options for my future career, such as joining the foreign service to facilitate global partnerships on tech diplomacy, partnering with international organizations to establish frameworks that can be used to guide state regulations, or working with private companies to understand regulations and ensure products are abiding by those regulations for ethical tech services.

A Few More Words About My Experience

In my final year at Clark I took on a leadership position as Vice President of Clark Competitive Computing Club (C4). This club is one of the tech focused clubs on campus. Our goal was to create a community amongst computer science students at Clark, supporting students throughout the program and through their career searches. We held many different events, from panels, to workshops, to student get-togethers. We were also very passionate about making computer science more diverse and accessible for different groups, to this end we regularly held outreach events to teach coding to young students in the Worcester community, partnering with other Clark clubs, and other events (our "Code@Clark" series) to help members of the Clark community become more comfortable with tech skills. When I stepped into the role, I knew one of the areas I wanted to work on was community outreach. My interest started in CS because of a required coding class in high school and a field trip to IBM to see their programs focusing on women in tech. From that moment, everything clicked and I knew what I wanted. All it takes is one moment to introduce the right kid to the right field, and my hope was that by exposing kids in Worcester to tech, through our outreach events, teaching coding through Lego Education Robot kits, that at least person would find something they really loved. The hope also was that with our E-Board of mostly women, and people of color, that these kids could see themselves in this field and see a future doing this. This is an idea I also tried to carry into the rest of our club events on campus, hoping to bring more women and people of color into the major, and show them that if I can do it, succeed, and hold leadership, that they could too. One of our major events we held every semester is our 48-hour hackathons. The hackathons we hosted while I was Vice President were major successes, garnering projects that have been promoted around campus as actionable solutions, and gaining much more attention and praise from across campus for our small, but mighty, computer science department.