The Coding it Forward Fellowship is empowering the next generation of technology leaders to innovate at the intersections of technology and public service in all levels of government offices across the United States. Fellows work across cybersecurity, data, design, product management, and software engineering to deliver service, improve systems, and strengthen products on behalf of the American people.
We are grateful for our government partners who provided our cohort of 12 Fellows with the opportunity to serve and grow this summer:
Federal Offices:
State & Local Offices:
- Boston, MA: Procurement Department
- Longmont, CO: Office of Data and Analytics
- New York City, NY: Department of City Planning; Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity
- State of New Jersey: Office of Innovation
This repository features the slides that Fellows presented during their respective end-of-summer presentations at their government offices. View a recording of Coding it Forward’s Demo Day.
Kindly note that if a Fellow's biography does not have a link, their work is not publicly available. If a Fellow's biography contains a link without the actual PDF uploaded, their presentation is still under review for release.
Akhil Raote is an industrial and product design student at the University of Washington. This summer, he was a UX fellow at the City of Boston working within the Procurement Department, helping develop a better way for CoB Finance staff to access and visualize their financial data. | Presentation
Andrea Danila is a recent graduate from the University of Washington Seattle with a B.S degree in computer science (data science). This summer, she worked at the General Services Administration at the Office of Strategic Communications (OSC). Her work included a robust sentiment analysis on survey data collected by the OSC digital team over the last 1.5 years, which was implemented in Python.
Ashley Chu is a recent graduate from the University of California, San Diego, with a B.S. in Cognitive Science: Machine Learning and Neural Computation. This summer, she worked at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the Research Branch of the Local and Regional Foods Division alongside Galiba Anjum, where she supported grants analytics work, made geospatial and descriptive visualizations to share agritourism research with the public, and created a proof-of-concept retrieval-augmented generation model to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act review process. | Presentation
Ben Kim is a rising senior at the University of Chicago studying Computer Science and Law, Letters, & Society. This summer, he worked at the Office of Data and Analytics in Longmont, CO. Ben helped develop the data architecture using Snowflake in order to enable the automation of data updates in data visualizations. | Presentation
Galiba Anjum is a current senior at Cornell University double majoring in Computer Science and Information Science with a minor in English. This summer, she worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in the Local and Regional Food Division’s Research Branch, where she supported cooperative agreements on agritourism and local food purchasing programs. She cleaned and validated a two-year dataset of over 200,000 quarterly reporting records submitted by state entities, writing Python scripts that leveraged libraries such as pandas, fuzzywuzzy, and Census Bureau reference data to eliminate inconsistencies. Her work identified and removed more than 15% duplicate or inconsistent entries, ensuring the dataset’s reliability for downstream analysis. In addition, she designed and refined data visualizations including geospatial maps and statistical charts using R to make survey results accessible to the public. These outputs were iteratively improved based on stakeholder feedback and built upon for future publication. | Presentation
Harris Wang is a rising senior at Emory University majoring in Data Science and Informatics. This summer, he worked with the NYC Department of City Planning’s Data Engineering team to develop a proof-of-concept pipeline leveraging large language models to geocode capital planning projects. Over the course of his 10-week internship, he successfully implemented the pipeline architecture and built a comprehensive evaluation framework. | Presentation
Jia Qi is a rising senior at New York University studying Data Science and Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the State New Jersey Office of Innovation, on Platform team. There, she helped scale the impact of the office by developing products that help state employees work more efficiently and effectively. Her work aims to simplify and optimize the work of over 350 state employees. | Presentation | Courtney Brousseau ‘19 Community Builder Awardee
Koji Wong is a rising sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis studying Computer Science and Mathematics. This summer, he worked at NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity on the Benefits Screening API, helping New Yorkers screen for benefits and programs they may qualify for. His work resulted in a ready-to-integrate replatformed and re-architected version of the existing API, improving scalability and maintainability. | Presentation
Luna Chen is a recent graduate from University of Washington with a BS in Computer Science. This summer, she worked at the New Jersey Office of Innovation on the Resident Experience Initative team, where she helped streamline the process for Doulas to enroll in Medicaid. | Presentation
Madelyn Lee is a recent graduate of the University of Washington studying Informatics with a minor in Japanese. This summer, she worked on the Voice of the Customer team at the General Services Administration, sharing best customer experience practices across the organization. Her work provides 8,000~ GSA employees with the foundation to apply customer experience principles in their work. | Presentation
Vannessa Wong is a recent graduate from Cornell University with a BA in Information Sciences. This summer, she worked with the New York City Mayor's Office of Economic Opportunity on the ACCESS NYC eligibility screener product. To help improve completion rates of the screener, Vannessa supported three rounds of usability testing and implemented major design and copy iterations. Her focus was on simplifying input fields, reducing the perceived length and complexity of the screener. | Presentation
Yalda Nafisinia is a recent graduate from Seattle University with a M.S. degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering Specialization. This summer, she worked at GSA Office on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) System, helping Voice of Customer team to efficiently accessing information via RAG. | Presentation
Please contact our team with any questions.