Hello everyone! I am Sam Daitzman, a student currently enrolled at NuVu Studio and Harvard’s Extension School Program. I left high school in under a month because I wanted a more relevant, modern education. I’m in my fourth year at NuVu Studio now, and I’ve worked on projects from fashion to prosthetic design to filmmaking and programming. I’ve organized a local youth civil rights group and a protest with the ACLU of Massachusetts, along with StudentRND’s CodeDay Boston event (which I am an evangelist for). I love the idea that design (in all media) can be guided by a moral and ethical purpose, rather than profit margins alone. I’m currently working an a completely reimagined treatment for Seasonal Affective Disorder at NuVu.
For my youth organization, I’m choosing Girls Who Code because I think it’s both an excellent example of effective youth activism with clear goals, but also because I see some excellent ways that the organization could be improved. They recently ran a series of campaigns that were overly focused on traditional notions of “biological sex” that detracted from the intersectional nature of sexism in the technology industry. They also tend to emphasize wage/career-centric benefits of programming over the experiential benefits or the empowerment of creation, which makes them less accessible to young women. Despite these issues, Girls Who Code has introduced programming to a generation of girls, many of whom have showed up to events like the one I organize in Boston.