From left: Chris Bronk (Baker Institute), Tory Gattis (Rice), Mark Embree (RCEL), Frank Carmody (Administrative & Regulatory Affairs, City of Houston), Robyn Moskowitz, Mayor Anise Parker, Vivas Kumar, Frank Stinnett (Information Technology, City of Houston), Alfred Moran (Administrative & Regulatory Affairs, City of Houston), Anthony Elam (RCEL)
This past summer, two Rice engineering undergraduate students, Robyn Moscowitz ’12 and Vivas Kumar ’14, worked for the City of Houston as inaugural members of a program with the City of Houston, Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RECL) and the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Mentored by Rice alumnus and George R. Brown School of Engineering lecturer Tory Gattis,the students served as internal information technology consultants. The students’ observations follow:
During our three-month internship, we focused on three broad projects: investigation of the management and tagging of email correspondence, study of a knowledge management strategy with open source software components, and the development of smartphone mobile data entry in the city’s Neighborhood Protection Corps. Through agile and rapid analysis, we laid the groundwork for what we hope will be the crafting of innovative solutions to these and other issues in the City of Houston.
The experience was a tremendous opportunity for us as engineering students to apply design methodology to some of the city’s most pressing policy issues. Throughout the summer, we were challenged to learn about several topics outside of engineering, ranging from city administration and organizational hierarchies to business process management. We also had the chance to meet many motivated individuals throughout the city who are passionate about adopting new technologies on a city-wide scale.
Although we faced several hurdles during the course of our internship, we succeeded in completing comprehensive studies that the city will use as models for shaping their future IT and application development projects. The internship was a pivotal component of our professional growth, and we both sincerely believe that opportunities such as these are incredibly valuable in allowing students to apply the skills they learn in a classroom to important problems in the real world.
We would not have enjoyed the success of our internship without the help of many individuals from the City of Houston, the Baker Institute and the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership. We thank all involved parties for their dedication throughout this summer, and look forward to staying involved with the maturation of our projects throughout the year.
Vivas Kumar ‘14 is a sophomore in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Will Rice College and Robyn Moscowitz ‘12 is a senior in Computer Science at McMurtry College. They are currently working on a paper about their summer internships with Chris Bronk, the institute’s fellow in information technology policy.