About Me
I'm Matthew Liechty, a rising senior at The Pennsylvania State University studying Film Production and English. A fun fact about me is that I'm doing this presentation from England. An unfun fact is that basically no where in England has AC and they're in the middle of a heat wave.
What drew me here?
What initially drew me to Technology 4 Causes and the Transformation Guild was pure luck. I had been searching for a summer internship and found this opportunity on LinkedIn. I liked the values they espoused and was eager for a chance to help better the world.
Originally I thought that my application would be like the many others I made to different companies and programs, but when I heard back I was super excited that I got the opportunity to work, gain experience, and help others and so agreed immediately to sign on.
What I learned
Working remotely has taught me a lot about time management, being a self-starter, and communication. I've learned a lot about email etiquette.
I've learned about interviewing people, creating landing pages, reaching out to corporations and charities, doing research, and creating forms using JSON code.
A key moment that changed my perspective was interviewing all these people who run charities and seeing just how compassionate and genuinely concerned for other's welfare that they were. Their selflessness really inspires a sense of optimism about the future of the world.
Spotlighting Harford Helps
My main project for the summer was helping to create digital content for the charity Harford Helps. I interviewed and wrote up articles about Equine Therapy, Furniture Furbishing, and Community Outreach for this. I learned about reaching out, crafting questions, researching charities, and creating content with this project. I also worked with Aleesha Khan on this.
My Role
Besides working on Harford Helps, I worked on a variety of projects. I edited many social media videos and even a twenty-minute interview I conducted with Natalie Johnson, the COO of Inner County Outreach. The hardest part of this role was definitely managing transferring files between different devices, as that can be rather touch and go.
I also created the "Do You Know A Hero Official" from, which ended up being my biggest challenge during this internship. Not because the form questions were difficult to create, but because learning JSON and Anvilor and creating fields in the back-end and EEL logic turns out to be, in my view, frustratingly convoluted. Fortunately it all worked out in the end though.
I also created some graphic designs for Technology 4 Causes on Canva, which served as a fun side project to work on which involved a merciful lack of error messages about how my JSON form had some catastrophic error.