Coffee Chat with Christina Wodtke

Thoughts from Gray Wong ’21

For our coffee chat this time, we invited Christina Wodtke, a lecturer at Stanford in HCI for the CS department and also in product design for the ME department. I’m currently enrolled in her class on game design (CS 247G), and it was so interesting to see her wisdom applied in other areas and to hear her advice for us. Here are just some key points from our chat:

• Perhaps it’s common sense, but when looking for work, don’t work for companies that go against your beliefs! Christina suggested looking into S. H. Schwartz’s universal values as a starting point to gauge a company’s values.

• Being well-versed in both the CS side and the design side of things is something that can make you so unique and marketable; most people typically focus on one or the other, but knowing how the two fields interact together is so important in making something work.

• Advocating for those not in power is so important to tech. There are many opportunities for things in tech to be unethical, and you can help to prevent this. This can be in the form of speaking up when something strikes you wrong, stepping up to positions of power to help advocate and add diversity, making space for such folks, and so on.

Thank you so much for talking with us, Christina!