University of Michigan School of Information
Jessica Taketa
Over the summer, I completed an internship with Generation Titans, a social impact firm with a race and equity lens. Based in Washington, D.C., they aim to develop market solutions for startups of color to access the early-stage funding and customer validation they need to thrive. In my role as a Research and Development Analyst, my time was spent developing and implementing a multi-source data collection strategy to rapidly build a national database of entrepreneurs of color. This entailed developing a data collection strategy, creating code to scrape Twitter data, and analyzing the data base. However, given the lack of data, we decided to shift the objective of my internship to building a strategy to build universities and colleges into the entrepreneur ecosystem. Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience. Although there have been difficulties faced in navigating changes in my objective, I believe it has prepared me to adapt to changing demands, a skill that is vital in the field of public interest technology. My internship will be continuing into the fall semester.