More Than a Developer: My Adventures in Civic Tech
I often think back to a specific day in the fall semester of my junior year. I’m sitting in the Computer Science (CS) lounge early one Saturday morning, waiting for the Data Structures and Algorithms Teaching Assistant (TA) to arrive. Another student I know walks into the room to quickly print something. We exchange casual greetings as the two of us go about our business. In an attempt to break the silence, he asks me about how the class is going, and I reply openly and honestly about struggling through the material and the major as a whole.
You see, unlike many of the other students in the department, I didn’t grow up coding. I wasn’t building websites from scratch at age eleven. I was engaging with other areas of technology, like Information Technology and especially Tech Journalism. I loved reading reviews of all kinds of tech — from laptops and media players, to game consoles and cell phones. For a long time, I could tell you the specs on almost any cell phone anyone had. And I did just that. I also spent a few years working at the IT Department of my high school and college repairing computers and helping other people with their tech questions. Yet, that student asked me a question that has lingered in my mind ever since:
“Why are you doing Computer Science if you don’t enjoy coding?”
And even though no one has really asked me that aloud, I responded with the answer, my most honest answer:
“Because I need a Computer Science degree to get to where I need to be. There’s more to Computer Science than just coding.”
When I said that, I honestly thought nothing of the latter portion of my answer. I was only focused on the former. My dream is to be one of the great big tech CEOs, running a company determined to change the world through technology. But it’s true, CS isn’t just about learning a coding language. It’s about learning how to code, how to think, and how to problem solve. Yes, it uses a more mathematical approach, but you can take the skills learned from CS and translate them into almost anything you do in life. And I think that’s ultimately what drew me to the field and what continues to keep me here.
As a Computer Science TA myself, my students often ask me about internship opportunities, and of course, my own internship experiences. One day, I was holding my own office hours when one of my students asked me, “have you found an internship yet?” As with seemingly every CS student at Brandeis, I applied to the software engineering internships at a bunch of major tech companies as well as some of the smaller ones. I had not received any offers. My student looked at me and quickly put a smile on his face.
“You NEED to apply to this,” he said. And that’s when he told me about Coding it Forward and its Civic Digital Fellowship.
Coding it Forward is a student-led non-profit organization that’s all about empowering the next generation of technology leaders to create social change. It focuses on providing Computer Science, Data Science, and Design students an entryway into civic tech by breaking down the barriers to entry in various social impact spaces. The Civic Digital Fellowship is a data science and technology internship program for students ready to solve pressing problems in federal agencies.
Before becoming a 2018 Civic Digital Fellow, I never considered working in the federal government, much less doing something tech-related in the government. Yet, here I was, working at the Department of Veteran Affairs with The U.S. Digital Service. USDS is the government entity that you’ve probably never heard of. And while it does sound like a company that just digitizes forms for the government, they do so much more than that. They’re responsible for helping different government agencies find innovative tech solutions to some of their most irritating issues.
Created out of the Healthcare.gov fiasco, USDS is President Obama’s start-up experiment gone right. Eventually expanding beyond Healthcare.gov, they’ve now a part of other government agencies like the Department of Defense and the Department of Veteran Affairs. The Digital Service at Veteran Affairs (DSVA) is the cool and fun environment that was the exact opposite of what I expected my government job to be like (shoutout to my manager Natalie). It’s a group of technologists dedicated to social good and helping veterans get the benefits they’ve earned.
But this Fellowship has taught me more than just new programming languages and technologies. It has exposed me to a world of people who are passionate about using their industry experience in tech to do some real good in the world.
And more importantly, those people have shown me an entire range of jobs and careers related to technology and computer science that aren’t software engineer or developer. There’s just so much you can do with a degree in Computer Science, and being in an environment at school where everyone is so fixated on being a software developer, you sometimes forget that. Or at least I did. The Civic Digital Fellowship exposed me to other options, in action, in a place where people want to make a difference. I mean, do you know all the jobs you can get with a Computer Science degree? Let me list a few for you:
- Business Analyst
- Product Manager
- Project Manager
- Program Manager
- UX/UI Designer
- Graphic Designer
- Animator
- Technical Writer
- Technical Recruiter
- Technology Consultant
- Systems Administrator
- Database Administrator
- Network Technician
- Cyber Security Engineer
- Scientific Programmer
And yes, most of these are still technical, but not all of them involve coding. Everyone talks about exploring different majors in college, but don’t forget to explore different career paths within each major. I mean, who knows? Maybe you’ll find a career path that’s exactly what you’re looking for but isn’t quite what everyone else is doing. And that’s cool too.
R Matthews was a 2018 Civic Digital Fellow working as a frontend developer at the Department of Veteran Affairs with Digital Services at VA. He is a rising senior at Brandeis University studying Computer Science and African & Afro-American Studies. Learn more about him at www.rrmatthews.com.
