University of Washington Center for Human Rights

15 Year UWCHR Celebration

From Winter 2024 to Spring 2025 (with a brief hiatus from Summer 2024 to Autumn 2024), I have worked as a Human Rights Fellow at the Center for Human Rights (UWCHR). I first connected with UWCHR through my mentor in the Interdisciplinary Honors Peer Mentoring Program, Tara Saleh, while catching up over coffee one day. I had just finished a summer internship in public interest technology, I told her, and was looking for further opportunities to get involved in similar research during the school year. Having worked at UWCHR herself, Tara recommended I reach out to the Center to learn about their own technical work.

Since connecting with Phil Neff, the UWCHR research coordinator, I have loved every second of working there. My work at UWCHR is an incredibly fulfilling way for me to use my technological skills to give back to refugee and immigrant communities--a background that my own family comes from. My projects at UWCHR have included training machine learning models to categorize immigration arrest records (which was included in a recent public report), submitting public records requests to law enforcement agencies, and most recently conducting data analysis on large immigration enforcement datasets. In my work, I have been able to apply knowledge from an interdisciplinary range of classes such as CSE 447 (Natural Language Processing) and PHIL 405 (Political Philosophy of Race), but I have also learned a great deal of technical and humanitarian knowledge from Phil and the UWCHR staff. In addition to my official work for UWCHR, I have also been able to bring my work into class projects to give back to the organization, in classes such as CSE 582 (Ethics in AI) and CSE 581 (Computer Ethics). I even asked Phil to write my letter of recommendation for the BS/MS program, which I was accepted into.

The biggest impact that working at UWCHR has had on me, however, is cementing the value of service. Having worked at both UWCHR and a big tech company like Amazon, I have learned that that I feel most fulfilled when applying my technical skills for others in need. This was the reason that I turned down my Amazon return offer, for example, and decided to work for a nonprofit called USAFacts next summer. No matter where I go next, I will always carry with me the valuable lesson from UWCHR to center marginalized and vulnerable communities in my technological practice.