Public Interest Technology Clinic Application

This course is not a typical class. 

Instead, it is a group-based, applied data science experience where you work with real clients and deadlines, combining technical analysis with the nontechnical skills needed to translate client needs into thoughtful, ethical, and practical solutions.

Most courses are designed to teach you techniques and reward you for applying them correctly to well-specified problems. This one is different. The core skill we are trying to build is judgment: the ability to make consequential decisions under uncertainty when the data are incomplete, the problem is messy, and there is no unimpeachable answer. In real public-interest data work, additional analysis is always possible, but time, context, and responsibility force you to decide when something is good enough to act on. Learning to operate in that environment is uncomfortable — sometimes frustrating, sometimes ambiguous, and often demanding. In that sense, the class will involve a fair amount of struggle. But that struggle is the point. By the end of the semester, if you engage seriously, you will likely have learned more about how real sociotechnical work actually happens than in almost any other course you take. 

So before you commit: understand that the course is intense, responsibility is real, and dropping is not an option once it begins.

If you stay, the expectation is that you lean into the difficulty and treat the experience as an opportunity to build the judgment required to do meaningful work in the world. This is not about producing perfect answers; it is about learning how to decide and act when perfection is impossible.