Wogrammer Journalism Fellows
Winter 2019
Join us in welcoming our new Journalism Fellows, Adora Svitak and Hillary Fleenor. We are excited for you all to learn a bit about them and read their stories in the coming months. Special thanks to Craig Newmark Philathropies for being the lead sponsor of our fellowship!
Adora Svitak, currently a Communications Fellow at the Wikimedia Foundation, is passionate about using writing and public speaking to advance social causes. In 2010 she started advocating for youth empowerment and student voice in education reform, delivering a TED Talk called “What Adults Can Learn from Kids” and supporting student representation at education conferences like SXSW EDU. While a student at UC Berkeley, she wrote for a social science research institute, led the nonpartisan Berkeley Political Review, and studied international development (with minors in South Asian Studies and creative writing). She is interested in journalism that illuminates how engineering shapes society, and ultimately hopes to share stories that attract some “unusual suspects” to STEM fields.
Diversity is key to ensuring that engineers are optimizing for everyone and not just the privileged few. Progress isn’t made in echo chambers with the “culture fits” in ol’ boys’ clubs. I want to support women and girls in technology because I believe in a world women are equal partners in building.
Hillary Fleenor teaches and works in the School of Computer Science at Columbus State University (CSU) in Columbus, Georgia. She has master’s degrees in Education and in Applied Computer Science and a passion for expanding opportunities for everyone to learn how to create using technology. Her areas of interest include computer science education, creative computing, and text mining. Hillary believes that diversity is the key to solving the world’s problems. It is only by learning how to communicate effectively with one another and working together to continue to discover how the universe works that we will be able to reach the potential of humankind.
“In the world today, knowing how to use computing to create solutions to problems is an essential skill. Access to computing education should not be optional. It’s a social justice issue.”
