What are your main responsibilities at your position? What are some of your big projects? (this can include projects at your internship, your specific CAP project, etc)
As a Tayo Fellow, my main responsibilities include software management for our online misinformation tracker, research and editorial work for documents such as our Asian American Disinformation Report, community engagement tracking, and multimedia content creation in collaboration with the HHS “We Can Do This” COVID Vaccine Campaign. My CAP project with SALDEF was to investigate the extent to which Asian-American history was included in U.S. History textbooks used in Texas public high schools, as well as write up an activists’ guide for those interested in replicating our project or
researching further. We took the methodological approach of conducting a several discourse analyses in order to ascertain common patterns and themes regarding the portrayal (or lack thereof) of Asian-American events, concepts, and historical figures.
How does this internship fit with your professional and career goals?
It has first and foremost served as a medium with which I can connect and network with the Filipino-American professional community. Further, it has given me ample insight onto the politics of the Philippines through the research I have conducted, which has allowed me to practice employing my foreign policy knowledge in similar ways a diplomat or ambassador might. Misinformation tracking software management has also been an extremely practical skill to learn, as the future of politics and even legal interpretation will rely on the discerning of objective truths, and working with software is was a good introduction to taking my technical skills to the next level (especially in the face of rising cybersecurity concerns globally).
What do you hope to achieve this summer as a part of CAPAL’s 2022 cohort?
A connection with young Asian-American leaders where we keep in touch and help each other out whenever
What does public service mean to you? What sparked your interest or desire to get involved with public service?
To me, public service means contributing selflessly to the smooth functioning of society for the purpose of the societal gains yielded by service rather than for the ulterior motives that make people question their trust in those around them. My interest in public service was most directly sparked by my mother, who worked tirelessly to save the day almost every day by spontaneously inventing these absurd, arbitrary, little rules make life seem fair even though she knew it wasn’t. For instance, in the face of a slight scarcity in the supply of last night’s leftovers to be shared between my brother and I, it immutably became household gospel that one halves the portion, the other chooses theirs first.