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Assistant Director for Diversity & Outreach

Contact:
206-616-6536
ravena (at) cs.washington.edu
Room 202 in the Paul Allen Center
box 352350


I joined the Allen School advising staff in 2007, and became the Allen School's first Assistant Director for Diversity & Outreach in 2016. My role encompases many areas of diversity and inclusion: overseeing our K-12 outreach, supporting student leaders in shaping their community, coordinating policies and programs to improve access to CSE and computing, co-leading the Allen School Inclusive Community Workshop, and coordianting the Allen School Diversity Committee. 

I was not interested in diveristy when I was younger. Despite coming from a lower-income family and attending very diverse K-12 schools, I didn't see the personal relevence or broader importance of equity and inclusion until later in college. While working with the College Success Foundation and taking my first education course, I began to see how social inequalities and bias limit both individuals and our society as a whole. But I also saw how improving equity and inclusion benefit everyone. I decided to work in education to help students, and to help make higher education a better place for all people to fulfill their potential. We still have a lot of room for improvement, but I've seen progress in my 10+ years at the UW.  

Personal info: 

I was born in Seattle, grew up in Everett, and attended Mariner High School. I earned my Bachelors from UW in 2006 in Interdisciplinary Visual Art and The Comparative History of Ideas. I wrote my Bachelors thesis on how high school architecture impacts students' college aspirations (conclusion: nicer schools help students aim higher, but teaching and culture are what really matter). In 2013, I earned my Masters in Education in Educational Leadership & Policy Studies. My graduate work focused on improving policies and student programs to support underrepresented students in engineering (conclusion: educational institutions were not designed for diverse groups, so they unintentionally reinforce social inequalities; but we can create policies and programs that help all students succeed). As a student, I studied abroad in Berlin. I also worked a lot: at The Daily as the Design Chief and the Arts Editor; as an intern at the College Success Foundation, an Orientation Leader, a program assistant for the Washington State Achievers scholarship, a design intern at a design studio downtown, and as editor of The Anthology Project (a travel journal from the Comparative History of Ideas department). 

Outside of work, I'm a subscriber to The Seattle Rep and find reasons to visit southern California so I can go to Disneyland. I've volunteered in Ecuador three times with Timmy Global Health, and lived in Beijing for three months. 

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