Hi, everyone!
My name is Britney. I’m a first year, master’s student in the Viral Communications group at the Media Lab.
I was born and raised in Surry, Virginia (a small, but special, town about 1.5 hours southeast of Richmond). Prior to joining the Media Lab, I obtained my master’s degree in computer science (specializing in social computing) from Georgia Tech. My bachelor’s degree is also in computer science (with a minor in leadership studies), which I earned from Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. I am a lover of all things inspirational that promotes optimism, uplift, unity, and love. A few of my hobbies include playing basketball, spending time with family/friends, public speaking, and volunteering.
The project I plan to work on focuses on diversity and inclusion within technology from a cultural perspective. The journey I hope to take is to explore how culture, primarily black culture, and technology can be intertwined to make the field more inclusive. Instead of people of color primarily consuming technology, they’ll be producers of technology that they can see themselves within. My dream is to have more technology created that embodies what it means to celebrate and exhibit how great black culture is. My potential community partner, who I had the pleasure to connect with in the fall, is The Knowledge House – a non-profit organization aimed at developing a pipeline of tech talent from low-income communities.
Illustrated in the image above – I believe this design process will be filled with moments when an idea seems like it’ll be great, but we may have to come to a halt and do more brainstorming. We may also have times when we need to pause, or slow down, and think of other possible avenues to take. Addressing diversity and inclusion in technology is no easy task and will take lots of effort. However, no matter how many loops and circles we experience, we will get closer and closer to our goal if we just remember the reasons why we started. Some learning goals I hope to gain from this course include:
- communicating clearly and effectively the importance of representation + seeing one’s self within the technical field;
- gaining deeper insight into barriers that may have been overlooked while addressing inclusion within technology;
- and developing ideas on what avenue we should take in order to start moving toward the type of inclusion described briefly in the previous paragraph.
I am excited and truly looking forward to getting to know each of you, as well as your projects, throughout the semester!
– Britney