As a kid, the books I read 24/7 showed me that the world could be so much better, but it also had the potential to be far worse. In middle school, I was assigned to read the book Ender’s Game. In this story, a brilliant 6-year-old is rescued from his boring school and sent to a futuristic military program where he spends his time fighting aliens with his friends in a complex VR video game. In the final act of the book, spoiler alert, Ender Wiggins plays the video game one final time only to discover that it hadn’t been a game this time. His expert battle mind had been used by the government to commit actual genocide on an alien race. In this book, I saw a school environment that was stimulating and challenging but also toxic and inhumane. Despite its flaws, I saw glimpses of an educational environment I wish I had access to. 

my interest in social problems is really just a desire to bring the best parts of fictional worlds to life.

It’s observations like this that colored the way that I consumed and continue to consume most media. I credit my love of reading for sparking my interest in social problems. Books taught me that at the end of the day my interest in social problems is really just a desire to bring the best parts of fictional worlds to life.  The only issue is that solving problems isn’t as simple as leading a revolution to overthrow the government like my girl Katniss Everdeen. We don’t really have the option of starting from scratch. Solving large, onerous problems in the real world requires addressing smaller ones while staying within the constraints of complicated systems. Big problems are often tangled knots of smaller issues.

Like a group of tangled cables where no single cable is responsible for the knot, there is not a single reason for the issues that we see in the world. I remember watching Youtube videos about kids who went to beautiful schools and did cool research at universities and dreamed of ways to give all students in the US these experiences.  Those plans deflated quite quickly when I realized that it wasn’t as simple as more teachers and smaller class sizes. Healthcare, housing, crime, politics, and more are all connected to education quality and equity. Feelings of helplessness and pessimism followed. I believed these problems could never be solved since they were so intertwined with other issues.

The balloon wasn’t deflated forever though. Sometime after this and many similarly discouraging experiences, I discovered something. Sometime between a rant about the world to my sisters and when I started crocheting, I realized that social problems are like bundles of tangled strings or cables—you can begin untangling them from any point. If one line fails, I can drop it and start somewhere else. Progress can be made from many directions.

This is where Computer Science comes in. Tech is an amazing tool for understanding problems by allowing us to make meaning out of large pools of data. It’s also great at solving problems. Before uber eats, people had to change out of their ratty pajamas to go pickup a pizza. Now, I can go a week without leaving my house and remain well-fed.  However, tech cannot and should not be used to solve all problems. This is how we find AI taking over the world, and old people being conned into sending their social security checks and numbers to “the bank.” When I started thinking more creatively about how to solve big systemic problems, I began to be more curious and open to discussing less about how to use tech and more about when. 

When I say tech should solve problems, many immediately think of big tech or startups. They definitely have a part to play, but they aren’t the only ones who should be handling our world-saving tech. The government must play a role in fixing systemic social issues. Because unlike most companies, their first priority, at least in theory, is to improve people’s quality of life, not their stock performance. However, they are failing at their jobs everyday in many glaringly obvious ways. One has to look no further than our meme factory presidential debates that are more likely to produce catchy songs about eating cats and dogs than real policy progress. People often forget that the US government played a big role in the creation of the internet and GPS. I’m sure they are capable of creating a lot more useful tech to solve issues we face daily. They can be better at their jobs, I believe, if they have more people willing to work to reimagine it. I plan to be one of those people. 

An ability to bridge CS and Social Policy Analysis would help me to build computer models to help policymakers experiment with the consequences of their policy choices on simulated populations. One of the biggest obstacles to change is the fear of what might happen when we do something different. Models using machine learning could help alleviate these fears. Additionally, it could help me to build tools to help people more easily file taxes while navigating the biggest policymaking obstacle for such a tool: TurboTax’s lobbying against free tax filing. This dual understanding would help me build solutions and be part of the process of making it a reality.  I am even curious about looking at more confusing problems like hyper-partisanship and introducing the engineering design process to policymaking itself. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Solving interconnected problems requires interdisciplinary teams of people with strengths in all shapes and sizes. By combining expertise in computer science and social policy, I intend to be at the forefront of creating meaningful solutions to the problems I care about most.