Matthew J. Turk

Francis W. Parker School is an independent school that goes from kindergarten through twelfth grade, dedicated to the growth and development of the whole person, on behalf of our democratic society and the wider world.

• Spearheaded creation of flagship watchOS app for fall release. Written in 1,400 lines of Swift and with SwiftUI.
• Designed data models for watchOS target to be interchangeable with those of Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets, compiling from the same source code where appropriate.
• Identified memory leaks, network errors, rendering inefficiencies, and potential race conditions with Xcode and LLDB.
• Created mobile app redesign in React Native in collaboration with three interns and two frontend developers.
• Won first place of 10 in summer hackathon with said project, consolidating features from the iOS and Android codebases and integrating all-new modern, interactive interfaces.
• Wrote a Python script to intelligently geotag and plot articles on a heat map, which resulted in a web application that won first place of 9 in the interns-only summer hackathon and a pitch to integrate into production website.

• Built an internal Slack messaging automation to help reporters keep track of the race, gender, and ethnicity of sources featured in published content.
• Added enhancements to Django API, content management system, and A/B tests.
• Participated in six occupational training sessions, including ones on investigative journalism, data visualization, and beat reporting.
• Wrote documentation for AWS Lambda functions and managed Docker containers for local development.
• Attended regular standup meetings, as well as bi-weekly sprints.
• Worked directly with engineers and collaborated with editorial departments.

This 10-week program also involved fellows for audience engagement, data visuals, events, marketing, multimedia, reporting, and photography, all working together to cover state politics and current events, including two special sessions in the Texas Legislature.

• Designed components and features in React that communicate with backend technologies to present users with metrics and data visualizations about their businesses. Wrote documentation for said components.
• Collaborated with backend developers to establish objectives and design more functional, cohesive code to enhance the user experience. Additionally led refactoring of frontend codebase.

• Edited and published 20 pieces of data journalism.
• Recruited, trained, and mentored new data team members.
• Taught web scraping and modern visualization libraries.
• Documented data team processes, GitHub repositories, and institutional knowledge.
• Collaborated with writers across sections and multimedia teams on data-driven projects.
• Represented the data team in staff meetings and Daily events.

• Served on the Board of Directors for two volumes while further strengthening the paper’s digital presence and positioning it for continued growth and innovation.
• Successfully migrated the backend stack to PHP 8.0 without any live errors. Implemented website performance and search engine optimizations through caching, gzip compression, and several other methods. Average loading times decreased by roughly 60%.
• Facilitated a successful transition to a new advertising partnership that drove a near-doubling in revenue.
• Reviewed code changes proposed in pull requests and managed projects from conception to deployment, applying journalistic ethics across platforms and processes.
• Named First Place for Online General Excellence in 2022 California Journalism Awards (Campus Division, 4-year universities) for designing and maintaining the website of The Stanford Daily.

• Organized staff development and social events for writers.
• Maintained consistent communication with desk editors and worked to implement clearer goals, policies, and programs for personal essays and reported creative nonfiction.
• All section leaders are also expected to attend weekly editorial meetings, participate on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team, meet a daily content minimum, and aid in the layout of the print paper.

• Designed curriculum for a seven-week educational program for high school students interested in technology and software development for news media.
• Gave lectures on the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; version control; declarative programming; and data journalism in the 21st century.
• Hosted weekly office hours, connecting with the individual passions of students, as well as providing further mentorship and technical assistance on assignments.

• Organized weekly meetings with news writers and provided front-end editing throughout the week.
• Regularly developed pitches and network of sources.
• Wrote “How the Stanford Marriage Pact spread to more than 60 campuses in a year,” which received more than 60,000 views and became the most read article of Volume 260 within a week.

• Published articles related to ethics in technology weekly.
• Wrote beat memos and developed relationships with sources.

• Edited personal essays and narrative journalism.
• Co-hosted section meetings and provided live edits to writers.
• Documented and reflected on the experience of students in isolation while finishing high school and beginning college from home for the spring magazine.

• Selected as one of six authors to write for the autumn magazine.
• Initiated mobile application redesign, leading subteam with Sketch 3 and React Native.
• Applied modern principles of user interface design and familiarity with developer tools such as GitHub and Expo.

The goal of Project Phoenix is to combine efforts in staging, payload, structures, recovery, and avionics to successfully launch multistage, high-powered rockets at competitions.

• Managed Ruby on Rails-powered website and co-led rocket design subteam by teaching Fusion 360 to members.
• Migrated content to Webflow for a more robust and accessible content management system.
• Completed diversity, equity, and inclusion training to better serve as a leader in the organization.