Because Ballotready is a startup, I operated in several different capacities and on several different projects. The two projects that took up the most time were candidate research and GIS mapping. The candidate research essentially consisted of improving the information available on the BallotReady website by visiting and contacting various political campaign websites about the education, experience, and issue stances of their candidate. This information is essential to the quality of the voter guide that BallotReady provides voters, as well as its larger data pool that it provides private customers.

As an intern, I also specialized in GIS mapping. The first thing users input when they visit Ballotready’s website is their address. In order for this address to have any meaning in relation to the political information the user is seeking, we need to have correct and accurate GIS data. I contributed to this goal by scouring the web for GIS shapefiles and manipulating their structure in QGIS to get the outputs we needed for any given locality.

I also contributed to the vote-by-mail tool that Ballotready is developing by helping edit and write guides, while also cross-referencing our data with the data provided by state government officials.

I think I primarily applied the research skills I’ve learned as a political science major. The most challenging aspect of research is that it needs to be thorough, accurate, and comprehensive. Shockingly, the information about candidates running for political office is very uneven and hard to verify. The one piece of hard data we definitely had about any one candidate running for office is that they had gotten the right number of signatures to appear on the ballot. Little else was evident.

As a result, I often had to resort to expediency and accept that the information we could verifiably provide on a candidate might be a lot, some, or next to nothing. I was familiar with such dilemmas from many of the quantitative political science classes I’d taken. I’d seen in these classes that sometimes the data is simply inconclusive. In light of this, the most important thing is to maintain accuracy. This mantra applied to the brand of BallotReady, which prides itself on providing accurate, informed data to voters. Indeed, BallotReady would be nowhere without the trust of its clients and public users that they do provide accurate information.

I had a really difficult time initially gaining a grasp of how to clean shapefiles on QGIS. I believe this challenge was compounded by the fact that I was working from home. If there was an issue, I either had to wait long periods of time and reach out over Slack channels to get help, or figure it out on my own. The issue with any coding language is that small errors can grind the whole task to a halt. Again and again, I had to overcome these small challenges and hiccups in my code by proactively reaching out for help or finding a solution on my own time.

I’m thankful to have experienced these challenges, however. I chose to specialize in QGIS because my strengths are far more geared towards the humanities and analytic modes of thinking. I gained a new appreciation over the course of my ten weeks at BallotReady for the challenge of tinkering with a problem until the pieces come together.

My main takeaway from the experience is that the worlds of academia and professional life are far apart. The team at BallotReady had the best intentions for their interns and really made incredible efforts for us to learn. However, the nature of workflow was often repetitive because of the sheer breadth of work needed to complete projects like collecting candidates or manipulating shapefiles.

In school, you master a concept and then move on to the next thing. I never realized this linear progression, to one’s own advancement and progress, is a privilege. In a work setting, unless you indicate that you need a new task or set of responsibilities, you will continue to do the task you already understand and have mastered. I realized very quickly at Ballotready that there was room to break this tedium if I asked for new tasks and showed myself to be available to assist in different projects.

Looking toward my future roles, I’ll know to hope for good guidance, but also rely on my own insight and personal creativity to learn something new every week.