The Impact | Episode 2: Keerthy Reddy in Seattle

I'm Keerthi. I'm an AI and Emerging Technologies Fellow at the City of Seattle, and I'm a Noboru Scholar. I had like just graduated with a computer science degree. I think the path forward is probably a software engineer because that's what everyone else around me was doing. As part of this fellowship, I was put into the service design team, and I had no knowledge of it previously. The HR team was previously working through processing leave and ADA requests for the IT department in a really manual way, and so our service design team was supposed to make that a little bit more usable and more user-friendly. We had come up with a list of recommendations, and so being someone who had just joined the city and being kind of enthusiastic and having this degree behind me, I was like, oh, I can make those changes. It was really cool to see all of that come together and see all of the service design work combined And with the technology work that I was doing, it feels really good to be able to say, like, oh, I did this thing that helped this many people, and it actually positively impacted their lives. I think it makes me a more well-rounded engineer, or think in a way that I probably wouldn't have last year. It feels kind of like I'm assembling a little bit of a toolbox for myself to kind of take along to any of the future roles that I take on, regardless of whether that's in the public sector or the private sector. When you graduate college, it's like a weird time because you're thinking about what 10 years down the line might look like, but I think that's where a lot of new grads are at, and you kind of know where your interests lie, but you don't know what to do with them. I think fellowships like Noble REACH are like a great path forward, and it's a great way to like open a lot of doors and build your network in a way that would be really hard to do if you were just trying to do it by yourself. Thank you.