Meet Lauren Siegel: Civic Tech & Accessibility Advocate
I met Lauren through the Google scholars retreat and have been amazed by her ever since. I’m so excited to share her journey and story with the rest of you!
Tell us a little about yourself!
I just graduated from North Carolina State University majoring in Computer Science, Political Science, and Economics. Recently I finished up an internship on the data science team at the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. I was also pretty involved on campus, and I care a lot about interdisciplinary education, tech policy, and equity & social justice (particularly as it relates to tech). I’ll soon be working at Google as a software engineer.
How did figure out what you wanted to do and how did you go about doing it?
As a kid, I discovered HTML through the online pet simulator Neopets, where I was able to customize my online shop’s text size and color contrast just by changing a couple numbers in the code. As a legally blind kid, I was ecstatic to find something that could make my digital world more accessible to me, and I spent hours playing with hexadecimal codes and inline CSS to make shopfronts and profile pages that were both appealing for others to look at and easier for me to read. Years later, I took a…
