Ryan Pham appreciates the “really good coffee at ABC,” and more importantly, how his internship at ABC Supply strengthens his programming language skills while he works with large datasets at a corporate level.

Pham is responsible for writing scripts that extract and clean data from Jira, a work management platform, and helping to build dashboards that allow teams and project managers to better understand their progress and performance. “It is easy to extract data and do the technical work, but to really ‘analyze’ that data is a different story,” he said. 

In addition, Pham draws on his philosophy major, in particular Professor Phil Shields’s paper titled “Maybe We Can — But Should We?” This internship has also pushed Ryan to ask more questions about his own work: What assumptions does this metric make? What kinds of choices does it reward or punish? What intentions does it erase?’

During his internship, Pham is seeing, “for the first time, how data is used to influence human agency.”

“Working with the Jira metrics made me realize how much of the intention behind each decision is being ignored when people’s actions are reduced to patterns and predictions.”