Building a Career in Responsible Tech: Sarah Welsh, PhD, All Tech Is Human Program Director
By Sarah Welsh
My biggest piece of advice for people who are looking to do something meaningful–or who are interested in responsible tech–is to just keep pursuing what’s interesting to you. The story I’ll tell here is one where I continued to follow threads in my life that were intriguing and energizing.
In college when I was finishing up my creative writing degree, I was discovering French literature and trying to figure out how I could support myself as a writer. I was also really waking up to how great it was to learn.
And then I graduated and had to find a job.
After a couple years working as Editorial Assistant in publishing and cobbling together various income streams, I moved to New York and started a Master’s degree at The Graduate Center, CUNY. I wanted to test out whether French literature was something I could reasonably pursue in academia as a profession.
While I was doing my MA, I confirmed that I still loved French literature, but at the same time was becoming really interested in questions about privacy and responsible use of technology through my media studies and digital humanities classes.
I found a part time role as a research assistant at an education-focused research center, where my task was to provide support for high school teachers to integrate technology into their classroom practices. While the project was really important for the teachers we were serving, the main purpose wasn’t to address the ethical implications of technology–in particular privacy for the students and their data for instance.
I started to wonder about the lasting implications of technology. What does it mean to be a responsible technology user? At the time–it was about 2013–I didn’t even realize this was a field I could work in. How could technology really serve people best?
I started to wonder about the lasting implications of technology. What does it mean to be a responsible technology user? At the time–it was about 2013–I didn’t even realize this was a field I could work in. How could technology really serve people best?
When I left New York and moved to Austin to start my PhD, I was still interested in writing and was also increasingly interested in questions around the responsible use of technology, and the effects it had on users. I had also always wanted to teach writing.
So while I was at the University of Texas I studied Rhetoric, which is a flexible discipline that allowed me to pursue all these streams.
While teaching writing and media studies to undergraduates at UT, I wrote my dissertation on how we manage unwanted information about ourselves that exists on the internet. My research (and the classes I taught) looked at various policies like the Right to Be Forgotten and state by state laws around non-consensual intimate images, and how these policies good at deleting something but not necessarily at removing something completely from circulation and especially the public imagination.
I was particularly interested at the time in the ethics around ephemeral media like Snapchat, and Instagram stories, and published in this area but when I was wrapping up my research I realized I might be able to make a bigger impact outside of academia in the non-profit and tech spaces, even though I had really been on the professor track.
This required a huge pivot in 2020 (a difficult year to do anything, let alone switch careers). I slowly started building up connections in the responsible tech space–which I found out was a thing you could even have a career in when I was doing my dissertation research–and worked on lots of different projects including running a virtual event called A Better Tech, which is where I met Rebekah Tweed and learned about All Tech Is Human’s mission. Eventually I landed a role running the Responsible Tech Mentorship Program in 2023, which pulled a lot of these threads together: teaching, writing, organizing, project management, and a passion for responsible technology.
I love the role I have now because it allows me to work with lots of different people in responsible tech, because I am always learning and constantly innovating, and because I get to help grow the next generation of responsible tech practitioners all over the world. I think most paths in responsible tech don’t look linear because the field is still relatively new. But that’s also one of the great things about it–the field brings together so many different people with different experiences and skill sets, and that ultimately is one of its biggest draws for me. Whoever you are, you undoubtedly have something valuable to contribute.
Advice for your own journey:
Keep pursuing questions that are interesting to you and follow things that energize you rather than drain you.
Talk to as many people as you can in the field. There are so many talented people out there who want to help–find them!
Learn how to tell your own story with confidence and trust that someone will see you. It only takes one “yes.”
About All Tech Is Human
All Tech Is Human is a non-profit committed to building the world’s largest multistakeholder, multidisciplinary network in Responsible Tech. This allows us to tackle wicked tech & society issues while moving at the speed of tech, leverage the collective intelligence of the community, and diversify the traditional tech pipeline. Together, we work to solve tech & society’s thorniest issues.
Join our working groups on Cyber & Democracy and Tech Policy
Read our reports, such as our Responsible Tech Guide and our recent Responsible Tech Org List 2024
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Read our Responsible Tech Job Board and join our talent pool