“I strongly believe that the College and the Beeck Center are valuable environments to cultivate my diverse interests,” says Ras-Work. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know I’m well-equipped to meet it after my time at the Beeck Center.”

Ethan Fan (C’24)

Major: Biology of Global Health and Economics

Hometown: Columbia, Maryland

What inspired you to apply to the Beeck Center?

I was inspired to apply to the Beeck Center because of its mission centered around social impact through technology. I believe the field of data has a lot of potential and can be used to help underserved communities. I am also interested in connecting technology to modernize policy work and research. 

What research are you working on while there?

I am a student analyst part of the State Chief Data Officers Network Project. For my role, I research different fundamental state open data sets, create assessment criteria for those data sets and analyze them based on those criteria. I will be researching these 11 foundational datasets highlighted in a previous Beeck publication, Open Data for Economic Recovery, for all fifty states and compiling an aggregated way to display the research I have done.

What career development skills do you hope to gain while there? How does the Beeck Center help you achieve your career goals?

I hope to learn more about what makes data so important, why governments are behind in modernizing their platforms and how I can apply data to any research I do on a daily basis. At the Beeck Center, I have learned how to access and find any level of state spatial map data or numerical datasets that are published for transparency purposes. I have also learned common skills used in Airtable and Tableau platforms. I have learned more about my interested career field of health care, its increasing costs and common issues underserved communities face regarding healthcare. 

How does this help you with your work for the Beeck Center?

The Beeck Center has been very helpful in helping guide me toward the right field of work and the impact I hope to create with my major. A part of the student analyst program involves career development and workshops. In these events, we are asked to research more about what interests us in social impact and for me it is health care. Some assignments have asked me to keep up with the news in the healthcare field, some of the major problems arising in the field and finding data that could help address those problems. I think the skills learned from these assignments will help me in any field related to my major, whether that be research, non-profit work, or healthcare insurance. 

Katie Hawkinson (C’23)

Major: History, minor in Global Medieval Studies

Hometown: Spokane, Washington

What inspired you to apply to the Beeck Center?

I applied to the Beeck Center because I am passionate about making innovative thinking accessible to the public. As a Storytelling and Editorial Content Analyst, I will get the chance to learn more about the amazing work Beeck Center researchers are doing to evoke social change while making their findings digestible and interesting for the world.

What research are you working on while there?

I have a slightly different role than other students, as I am focused on communications rather than research. That means I take the amazing research that my coworkers have done and boil it down into parts that we can present to the public. I write blog posts for our website, craft Twitter and LinkedIn posts and I am even helping with the layout and design of reports. My job is really special to me because I get to engage with all the work done here at the Beeck Center.

What career development skills do you hope to gain while there? How does the Beeck Center help you achieve your career goals?

While working on communications at the Beeck Center, I hope to learn how to be a human-centered, ethical storyteller. No matter where I end up after graduation, being a strong writer with experience in storytelling will serve me well.

How does your major help you with your work for the Beeck Center?

As a humanities major, the bulk of my coursework and assessments are writing-based. Specifically, as a historian, I find myself studying the stories of civilizations, institutions and communities, trying to make sense of how each component of society worked together to create the historical record. In a way, I’m doing something very similar here at the Beeck Center — I take these amazing, technical reports written by our phenomenal staff and try to piece together how each step of their project matters to the larger picture, as well as how we can help the general public understand the significance of this work. In both my role as a student and as an analyst, I have the opportunity to find the most important pieces of complex processes and convey them clearly to others in an effort to spread knowledge and understanding.

Zega Ras- Work (C’23)

Major: Political Economy, minor Environmental Studies

Hometown: Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

What inspired you to apply to the Beeck Center?

I often find that data and technology enthusiasts overlook the importance of public policy for achieving innovation, and public policy people underrate the importance of data and technology for achieving broader societal goals. The Beeck Center lies right at the intersection of these worlds. I applied to Beeck to get involved with the emerging field of public interest technology, and I now see that the potential for innovation to address public needs including disease, food systems, poverty and inequality, and more is limitless.

What research are you working on while there?

At the Beeck Center, I work on the Data Labs project, which focuses on helping state governments leverage data for economic recovery from the pandemic. On that project I do qualitative research, identifying and sharing best practices on how states have already addressed key policy issues through data-informed decision-making. I am also starting to do quantitative work on our Chief Data Officers Network, normalizing program data and presenting it through forms of visualization. As a technical assistant, I also do smaller, issue-specific research assignments to support our program managers.

What career development skills do you hope to gain while there? How does the Beeck Center help you achieve your career goals?

I’m gaining some hard skills that involve working with data, as well as hopefully soon getting experience with some legal aspects of our work including contract-making, data sharing, and inter-organizational collaboration. I hope to also build on my teamwork skills as well as grow as a leader and communicator. The Center offers student analysts abundant mentorship opportunities with our supervisors and the Fellows, in addition to regular career development workshops that nurture skill building. I am also creating a valuable network here.

How has your major helped you with your work for the Beeck Center?

My economics major has been useful in a lot of my research pertaining to analyzing government interventions in different policy areas and some of the quantitative work I’m doing. I’m fortunate that the College has a top-tier economics department, where a lot of the courses I’ve taken have shaped my way of thinking in one way or another. I find that I’m frequently able to draw from theoretical frameworks and concepts that I’ve learned in class and apply them to the work I do now.

In my time at Georgetown, through academics, extracurriculars, and some of my work experience, I’ve developed a passion for environmental issues, especially energy systems sustainability and climate change. My work at Beeck has really piqued my interest in applications of data in the global clean energy transition, particularly in relation to energy resource data and geographic information systems. I’m curious about how high-quality data can be used with analytical methods and models to inform investment decisions and power sector planning in a way that is just and equitable.

Contributing to Communities

Before she was accepted into the College, Santos grew up in Miami-Dade, Florida where she became a proud product of the public schools there. The alumna says that as an undocumented student, she witnessed first-hand that the needs of many classmates were not being met by the school system and she knew a change was necessary.

After arriving at Georgetown, Santos decided to minor in Education, Inquiry and Justice in addition to her political economy major. She said that this experience along with her work for the undersecretary of education in Washington, DC helped her understand education at the national level to better help her local community.

Inspired by what she had learned, Santos moved back to Miami-Dade after graduation where she led entrepreneurship training and joined an advocacy group for the board of education locally before eventually running for a seat on the school board herself this year.

“Being by and from the community allows me to ensure that the policies enacted are actually to the benefit of my community,” says Santos. “Elected officials can solve problems that the people face and so the significance of serving the schools that I went to and having knowledge of what the community needs is beneficial. You can see the immediate effect on people’s lives.”

Orozco also grew up in the community where he now serves as a school board member. The alumnus has been active in the Yuba City, California school system since he served as a student worker in his high school cafeteria.

A psychology major who also minored in Education, Inquiry and Justice, Orozco worked in the DC public school system throughout the academic year and spent his summer breaks working in Yuba City schools. The differences between the two education systems motivated Orozco to pursue a career helping to improve Yuba City schools after he graduated from Georgetown.

“In DC public schools when students with disabilities were promised services, they received those services, which is not always the case in Yuba City,” he explains. “Working as a pareducator, with the distinct qualifications I had earned at Georgetown, I was able to more concretely advocate for students and explain their needs, but I still faced systemic obstacles fighting for equal access for students with disabilities in the system. I have always been passionate about serving the students I worked with and thought I could serve more effectively on the school board than I could as an employee.”

Primaries and Public Service 

Though the alumni were successfully elected to their school boards, the 2020 general elections for both Orozco and Santos were highly competitive. Santos’s campaign was against an established career politician who had served on the school board for 28 years. Similarly, Orozco’s opponent, who owns a campaign business in California, referred to Orozco as “just some kid.”

“I was a 22-year-old who had never run for office before, and there was a tendency for local officials to endorse my opponent and assess my candidacy on my age rather than my qualifications,” says Orozco. “But even though I was the youngest on the ballot, I won more votes than any school board candidate before me.”

Santos says that her time at Georgetown not only prepared her to build a fellowship of students and teachers that helped her win the election as well as be a woman for others.

“Being able to be a part of EDIJ was incredibly significant in helping me to realize that education could and should be for all students,” she says. “Additionally, learning about pedagogical approaches was a gift because it is now really my job and I got to do it as a student. After being elected I will execute on my proposed vision with service mindset of men and women for others to ensure that cura personalis is truly for everyone.”

Orozco also said that EDIJ was formative in his success as an educator due to the opportunities the program presents to engage with public schools through community-based learning. He also noted that the emphasis on living out your faith through public service at The Initiative On Catholic Social Thought and Public Life led by John Carr helped motivate him to fulfill his civic duty by running for office. 

Sabrina Wesley-Nero, director of the EDIJ, who worked closely with both Orozco and Santos while they were at Georgetown says that both alumni were determined to learn from the ways they had overcome past obstacles in order to use those lessons to inform the ways they pursued future opportunities.

“Both evidenced a commitment to equity in education with a focus on those who were the farthest from opportunity,” she continued.

Looking Ahead

As the representative for the 9^th district of Miami-Dade county, Santos is in charge of 80 schools and over 90,000 students. She says that her priority is collaborating with her fellow board members to increase awareness of schools’ needs.

Orozco has similar goals, the largest of which is advancing diversity within schools. After he serves his time on the school board, the alumni would like to go back to teaching in the classroom.

Both board members will be sworn into office by the end of 2020.

A Unique Time

Corcoran, who is studying Political Economy and Spanish, chose to travel to Spain to learn more about both of her majors in the hopes of eventually writing a thesis on the independence movement. She went to Spain through a program offered by Brown that began in January 2020.

While she was eager to visit her friends, who were also studying abroad in places like Berlin, Copenhagen and Lyon, Corcoran was most eager to get hands-on experience with Spanish politics.

“This is one of the places where democracy is actively being expressed and achieved,” Corcoran says. “In the United States, there is a general feeling of apathy towards politics, but in Barcelona, politics is personal, cultural and thought about every day and I was eager to immerse myself.”

Corcoran says that she is from an active political family, but knows that that is not as common in the United States. While in Spain, she witnessed small children wearing flags to represent different causes, and whole families would spend time together attending marches.

An Unexpected Journey

In the time before the announcement was made to return home, Corcoran explored Barcelona but also took a few short trips to Paris and Amsterdam. While in the Netherlands, the United States received its first positive COVID-19 case. One of Corcoran’s friends who was studying abroad in Bologna, Italy had already been sent home and told her and others to prepare for their own evacuations. At this point, Spain was still a Level One threat according to the CDC and students would not be evacuated until they reached Level Three.

“In Spain, many individuals including authority figures were not taking it as seriously, though personal space is almost non-existent and the population is very elderly,” says Corcoran. “The first time it felt like a real issue was when I was coming out of the metro and saw someone being transported into an ambulance by EMTs wearing hazmat suits two blocks from my apartment.”

Many schools remained open or simply suspended in-person meetings for two weeks. But on March 11, Corcoran and a group of her friends stayed awake to watch President Trump address the nation. Within the first two minutes, he announced that flights would be suspended from Europe in the next 48 hours. Corcoran now had less than two days to pack up her life from the past 10 weeks and return home.

“Though we found out later that this did not apply to Americans who were already abroad, we were told to return home by the university,” Corcoran says. “We received this order late Wednesday night and by Friday morning, I was on a flight headed back to U.S.”

Transitioning to Virtual Classrooms

Amidst this rapid-fire turnaround, Corcoran, like many other students, also had to determine how she would continue taking her classes from that semester, or if they would continue at all.

“As soon as I got an email from Georgetown about the , I met with my dean online and was able to begin two classes through the newly created semester for returning study abroad students, and continue to take two classes I was already enrolled in through my program in Barcelona,” Corcoran says. “I feel very lucky because friends from other universities that were part of my program could lose their credit for the semester since their schools were not offering courses to their students whose study abroad trips abruptly ended.”

Corcoran says that through GUGC she is able to take a major credit in addition to a common core credit, which was more than she was originally scheduled to earn.

However, the transition certainly has not been seamless. Corcoran said that on top of the stress of moving and the added exertion of jetlag, she found out that she had been in contact with four individuals who had COVID-19.

“I felt terrible because I found out after returning home to my parents,” says Corcoran. “But we took quarantine very seriously. I recently took the antibody test and came up negative, which means I never had it, but in these circumstances, it is so much better to be safe than sorry.”

Corcoran says that life is certainly different – she has yet to see her friends in person since returning to the United States. However, she says that her biggest takeaway from this experience has been the power of positivity.

“I think your mindset can really change how you view something, and you have to be able to frame things in a more positive way,” says Corcoran.” Though there is a space to be sad about what happened, there is a lot that I have to be grateful for, and focusing on the positives has been helpful.”

She also expressed how thankful she is to be a part of a college community that cares about each student individually.

“Georgetown has done a good job of listening to students and being so flexible with the different experiences and voices of each person,” says Corcoran. “My Georgetown professors have been so flexible and supportive. Everyone seems to have taken on a lot of empathy and I can tell that the faculty and staff are working hard to ensure that students are a having good experience despite us being apart.”

Click the links below to view parts two and three of our Returning Home from Abroad series

Returning from Abroad Part Two: Featuring Danielle Guida’s Journey Home from Italy

March 7, 2018 — Congratulations to Georgetown government professor , who has been awarded the .

The citation on the award reads: “The award was created to recognize outstanding senior scholars whose influence and path-breaking intellectual work will continue to impact the field for years to come.”

McNamara, who holds dual appointments in the Georgetown College and the , is an expert on markets, culture, and politics in the European Union and the United States. An alumna of and , she has been awarded numerous fellowships and visiting scholar positions, written two books, and seen her work published in major media outlets. From 2010-2016, she served as director of Georgetown’s .

McNamara’s current research focuses on the European Union and the development of cleavages in modern political culture. This year, she is teaching Fundamentals of International Relations and International Relations Theory and Practice, as well as serving as an honors thesis advisor.