If I had to pick one word to sum up this summer at BIDS, it would be admiration. Admiration for the people, for the work, and for the ways those two things intersect at UC Berkeley.
I studied Philosophy with a minor in Digital and Computational Studies, so I came into this internship with some context for critical thinking and digital tools, but not with the technical expertise many here already have. That meant I often found myself following conversations that quickly outpaced what I could piece together. But the most valuable parts of this experience were not about fully grasping the technical content. What left the strongest impression was observing how people positioned themselves in relation to one another, how they found ways to communicate across different backgrounds in order to make progress together.
That struck me as a skill in itself. A skill as important as fluency in a language, but one that is rarely emphasized so directly. Not everyone seeks to practice it, but the people I encountered at BIDS did. The best part of this internship was seeing communication not as an afterthought, but as a foundation for the work. It is not automatic for multiple perspectives to come together into a coherent solution. In fact, it is almost always difficult. What stood out to me at UC Berkeley was the recognition that this difficulty is part of the process, and the willingness to approach it directly instead of sidestepping it. That effort felt just as valuable as the technical expertise itself.
I admire the people I worked with not only for their individual projects, but for the way they made use of the community here to produce outcomes larger than any one contribution. For this blog I especially want to thank the people I worked with at BIDS: Tyler Hawthorne, Kyle Cheng, Kirstie Whitaker, Lilli Wessling Hart, and Adrian Hill for letting me learn alongside them this summer.
The kinds of projects I joined reflected this same emphasis on building together.
The GeoJupyter hackathon, cohosted by The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center for Data Science & the Environment (DSE), I helped out at was a clear example of collaboration in motion. What stood out wasn’t a single conversation or product, but the coordination itself. People shifted between groups, paused to exchange ideas, and returned with sharper focus. The flow of it revealed how much structure and communication matter when trying to move complex projects forward. What I found most impressive was how deliberate the foundation had been. The success of the event didn’t just come from those two days, it came from years of work to shape a community invested in showing up and contributing to one another’s projects.
Photo: Jamilah Karah and Tyler Hawthorne take notes as Kirstie Whitaker speaks during the Day 1 wrap-up session at the GeoJupyter hackathon.
Helping with the Berkeley Corporate Engagement Network retreat gave me another perspective. Fifty people in one room, each with their own ideas, could have easily turned into competing voices. Instead, the group was able to surface key objectives while still making space to examine potential gaps. What I appreciated most was how quickly the conversation moved from identifying challenges to brainstorming how to address them. That balance of critique and construction felt rare and productive to witness.
A more technical project I worked on involved analyzing seminar attendance data with Tyler Hawthorne. Cleaning the dataset for attendance at the BIDS seminars and experimenting with different graph visualizations was initially daunting, but it quickly became engaging. Tyler and I worked side by side bouncing ideas off each other, identifying issues with the data, and rereading the code again and again to see what could be causing us hiccups along the way. Instead of dividing this project in half, we chose to work together and supplement each other’s working knowledge towards a task neither of us were originally familiar with. It was satisfying to see how even a relatively simple dataset could inform decisions about outreach and participation going forward.
Looking back, the projects were important, but what they revealed about the culture here mattered even more. Collaboration at UC Berkeley is not just about pooling technical skills, it is about cultivating the ability to work together in ways that allow new possibilities to emerge. That is what I admired most.
I am grateful to everyone at BIDS who made space for me this summer, who let me watch, ask questions, and learn by participating. The work being done here is meaningful, but the way it is done left the strongest impression.
Photo: (from left) Lilli Hart, Jamilah Karah, Tim Tanghlerlini, Kirstie Whitaker, Kyle Cheng, Tyler Hawthorne