Collaboration, Heat Maps, & Memes: An Intern Retrospective
Hello hello, I’m Julia, recent graduate of UChicago/R tidyverse stan, and I’ve had the absolute pleasure of being an intern with the ACLU Analytics team’s legal pod these past six months. I started out part-time in spring, when I was still scrambling to finish my sociology thesis, and I remember my first day well. After sitting through 90 minutes of HR orientation in my dim dorm room, I’d rushed over to my campus’s sun-soaked computer science library and hopped on my first-ever Zoom call with Sophie Beiers, my spring supervisor, and Brooke Madubuonwu, the “legalytics” (legal analytics) pod’s director. They’d created an onboarding doc for me, and as we went over my next steps, nicely organized into a bullet-pointed-list, I remember being endlessly charmed by the Word Art-esque welcome at the start of the document.
A small thing, to be sure, but someone clearly cared enough to take a few seconds and consider how they might ease the awkwardness of a virtual meeting. This reflexive, easy care set the tone for the rest of my internship. When I think about my time here, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t the cool technical challenges or the wide spectrum of critical issues I’ve had the opportunity to help out on. It’s the people.
And because of the lovely people here, I have identified three key takeaways from my internship:
- Sustainable social impact work begins from strong, collaborative community
- A supportive community fosters a fundamentally curious and inventive approach toward data analysis
- A culture of support and creativity allows you to adapt nimbly to the unexpected
Takeaway #1: Sustainable social impact work begins from strong, collaborative community
First, the very structure of the Analytics team lends itself to collaboration. People here make a concerted effort to be available and accessible, all while being friendly/coming off as sincere human beings (shocker of shockers, I know! But Zoom socializing is HARD). Rather than dismissing team norms and “glue work” as an afterthought, the team purposefully sets aside time and space for these things, allowing them to create a remote workplace that feels like an actual community. I’m talking weekly all-team meetings that practice gratitude by opening with shoutouts; regular “coffee time” chats where people answer any of 3 quirky questions (and somehow, inevitably, end up ragging on Taco Bell); “water cooler” Slack channels to commiserate over technical pain, share adorable family photos, and add silly custom emojis over random news clippings like the demonic “I Voted” spider-crab (I personally took it upon myself to send a recipe each week in Slack — discovering the Instant Pot has been a joy of my summer).
This community, grounded in respect and collaboration, produces an incredibly supportive professional environment. I had my first taste of this during my spring term, where I worked on three major analysis projects with clear deadlines and deliverables: examining traffic stop trends in Illinois for the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department, racial disparities in marijuana charges for the ACLU’s Maryland affiliate, and sentencing rates for the Vermont affiliate. These projects offered great practice in data cleaning and analysis, but the most useful experience may have been communicating the results of my work to non-technical audiences. I’d mentioned to Sophie early on that I was interested in helping people with policymaking power make sense of and leverage quantitative analyses — serving as a translator, if you will — and she took that to heart, creating opportunities for me to present my analyses to our various stakeholders. Through fielding their questions, suggesting next steps, and then soliciting feedback on my performance from Sophie and Brooke, I was given the resources I needed to hone my communication skills. I was also incredibly lucky in that my supervisor happened to be our resident data viz expert! Working with Sophie taught me how to tweak visualizations to make them “pop” and as accessible/digestible as possible, further developing my data translation abilities. Sincerely, you will get out of this internship what you put in. If you know what you want, people are more than happy to help you get there.
Takeaway #2: A supportive community fosters a fundamentally curious and inventive approach toward data analysis
Moreover, because Sophie was so supportive of my learning efforts and because the Analytics team made it clear that they were invested in my success, I felt comfortable taking the initiative to pursue any areas of curiosity I came across during my analyses, rather than waiting around for my supervisors to assign me tasks. One example involves my final spring project, where I analyzed the differences between VT counties’ sentencing rates to assess the performance of state’s attorneys. As I dug further into this analysis, I realized an interactive geospatial illustration would efficiently communicate key ideas — if only I knew how to make one. Since our deliverable deadline wasn’t extremely tight and the bulk of the analysis was already done, I asked Sophie if I could just explore interactive viz packages for a day or so and ended up making my first ever interactive map. I felt quite proud, if a little like Ben Wyatt.
Jokes aside, my interactive map, as a way to communicate a particular data story, was the basis for several of the final infographics we shared with the Vermont affiliate. By encouraging my curiosity and giving me the space to experiment, the Analytics team not only underscored their trust in my capabilities and their commitment to my personal learning objectives — but also aided the creation of better outputs for our stakeholders.
Takeaway #3: A culture of support and creativity allows you to adapt nimbly to the unexpected
The combination of support and creativity was crucial for success during my stint on the team’s long-running, complex redistricting work with the Voting Rights Project. I was brought onboard to aid legal challenges to redrawn state legislative maps on the basis of racially polarized voting. Redistricting asks have a lot of moving parts; there are different legal teams in different lawsuit stages and skeins of (frequently messy, publicly-sourced) data from myriad statewide contests across multiple years. Urgent requests also semi-regularly come in, prompting a mad rush to reorient priorities and make deadlines. Having no prior redistricting knowledge, there were definitely moments of “what am I doing…where am I going?…who am I?😂” — especially when my beloved R decided to keep crashing after maybe/almost/just-nearly finishing a script run-through. Fortunately, because the team’s norms are intrinsically collaborative and value creativity, I knew where to seek clarification on integrating into the redistricting workflow.
In my regular check-in with my summer supervisor, Alex Yurcaba, I laid out my concerns, and we brainstormed solutions together to lessen code blockages. Alex then pointed out things he thought I’d done really well in our structured feedback section — and that pep talk, in all honesty, carried me through the fugue state of my redistricting work. My rapport with my supervisors was truly a highlight of my internship, giving me a supportive base to return to whenever I felt unsure about my work and next steps. When fighting (read: pleading) with RStudio for the nth time, the knowledge that I had someone in my corner who recognized where I’d tried to improve and where I might still be blocked made a tangible difference in keeping myself motivated.
Final thoughts
Over the course of this internship, it has become abundantly clear to me that a caring environment like the ACLU’s is critical for sustainable social impact work. Nonprofit employees unsurprisingly care deeply about their work, but that also means they are far more likely to “sacrifice pay, personal time, and comfort for their work” — making it all the more important that Analytics team members look out for each other, that they naturally and regularly check-in with one another. Social movement work always has setbacks, from earth-shaking Supreme Court decisions to everyday technical challenges. What carries the work — and the people who do it — forward are the relationships of trust and support we build.
All this to say — I absolutely loved working with the people here. It’s a given that the projects I contributed to were deeply meaningful and educational, but I also plain had fun. I cannot manufacture the level of ease I felt, equally at home asking the team a technical question as I was sending a nonsensical meme. In a recent chat with Sophie, she told me that she’d love for our paths to cross in the future, professionally or otherwise. Beyond making me ridiculously emo, it impressed upon me just how deeply people here cared about me and my continued success. The ACLU at large talks a lot about “people power,” about how everyday individuals can effect sweeping change by coming together and caring about each other. I was fortunate enough to experience that with the Analytics team.
Thank you to everyone at Analytics for being lovely. Special thanks to Alex, Sophie, and Brooke for being the absolute best supervisors.
