ITHAKA Engineering Perspectives: What It Means To Work at a Cutting Edge EdTech Non-Profit
By Shucha Grover
Shucha Grover, Associate Director of UI Engineering at ITHAKA, wanted to say a few words for our ITHAKA Tech Blog relaunch, reflecting on what drew her to this unique team of engineers and edtech professionals. What is it about ITHAKA that attracts engineering talent? More importantly, what makes them stay? If you’re interested in learning more about technology innovations, culture, and engineering at ITHAKA, please visit our ITHAKA careers page to learn how you could join our team.
Shucha Grover:
In late 2019, as I was interviewing at ITHAKA and contemplating if it would be the right next step for my career, I stumbled up on the ITHAKA Tech blog (then called Build Smarter). It allowed me a peek into what working at ITHAKA would be like. The post about empowered teams gave me a window into the organizational culture, and numerous other posts excited me about the technologies I could be learning about and experiencing while working at ITHAKA.
I started at ITHAKA on the day they, like much of the rest of the country, were starting to go remote for “just a few weeks” at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the rest, as they say, is history.
A few weeks are now turning into a few years, and so much continues to change around the world. One thing that has remained constant is our mission to provide access to knowledge to people everywhere. If anything, we dug deeper into philanthropic roots as our mission has become even more relevant to an increasingly virtual world of education. When colleges and universities abruptly shifted to fully online learning, we expanded access to journals and other resources at no cost to our higher education partners. And as we learned even more about disparities in different educational settings, we successfully launched our prison education initiative which has grown in leaps and bounds. (More on that soon.)
Our mission cannot be fulfilled without our people. So we met the challenge of going virtual head on by working extra hard to make sure that our rich culture of belonging, trust, and teamwork stayed relevant and the health of our virtual teams stayed ever strong as we opened up our doors to hiring talent from across the nation.
But we can’t rest here. As much as we have accomplished during the pandemic, there are bigger and more exciting technical innovations to come.
As we assess and take stock of where we are and how we’re moving forward (check out ITHAKA President Kevin Guthrie’s community letter: ITHAKA and JSTOR in 2023), we know that part of effective learning is sharing our learnings with others. We’re excited once again to invest in sharing what we have learned and accomplished in the last two years and to bring our readers along as new and exciting things unfold.
As I approach my three-year anniversary at ITHAKA, I know that my choice to join ITHAKA was the best decision I made for my career. I work with the smartest and kindest people with a deep social consciousness who are committed to our philanthropic mission.
Perhaps this story can be yours too. I hope you will choose to come on this journey with us to learn from our successes and failures and contribute ideas back. Maybe you will even choose to join our tribe of talented engineers and work alongside them innovating and contributing to make knowledge even more accessible across the world.
