Summer at the Tech Policy Lab

This summer, I interned with the University of Washington's interdiscplinary Tech Policy Lab. During my internship, I thoroughly enjoyed engaging with the lab's research and day-to-day activities through a variety of projects and duties. One of my projects, for example, was to produce one-pager reports of the lab's impactful research to communicate findings to a wider audience. Through this project, I learned about topics such as natural language processing and the tech policymaking process by reading through papers published by the lab. I then worked with the authors of those papers to create reports that summarized their proposals to address problems in those areas. Apart from writing these one-pagers, my other tasks included conducting outreach for the lab to UW students, drafting a funding request letter to Microsoft, and writing news updates for the lab's website. Yet, even with smaller projects like writing news updates, I found that I was still making meaningful contributions to the lab's operations and learning about the latest developments in tech policy.

A picture of me attending the WeRobot 2022 conference

My most enjoyable experience from this internship, however, was the WeRobot 2022 conference. WeRobot is an annual conference, attended by thought leaders from across the world, that explores urgent questions in technology policy. When I was assigned to help organize the conference at the beginning of my internship, I thought that it would be relatively boring and unenjoyable. While it was true that the preparation for the conference was rather mundane compared to the rest of my tasks, I actually had a great time attending the three-day conference.

The conference began with a full-day workshop at the Pacific Science Center with whimsical activities such as a "bad ideas workshop" and a trivia session (in which my team came in third). The next two days of the workshop were held at the School of Law, including presentations of cutting-edge academic papers from around the world and exciting robot demos. I learned so much about the future of robotics policy, asked questions to presenters, and made connections with industry and academic leaders. Seeing the diversity of the conference attendees' backgrounds opened my eyes to the growing opportunities in this field that I can pursue after college.

Overall, my internship with the Tech Policy Lab has reaffirmed that following the intersection of technology, ethics, and law is the right path for me. Not only has the internship helped me develop soft skills like writing and communication, but I have also discovered a passion for interdisciplinary research that I want to continue in my undergraduate career. This upcoming quarter, for example, I will continue exploring this field by taking the seminar CSE 480: Computer Ethics. I will also look for more research opportunities at UW exploring these emerging technological questions from new angles. I hope that I will look back on this internship and my first year at UW as a formative experience in a meaningful career.