When I think back on my time in Washington, DC for the 2026 AAAS/CASE (Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering) Workshop, what returns to me first is motion. Not a single statistic, not one talking point, not even a room. Motion. The feeling of arriving in the capital with a backpack full of notes, too many expectations, and the strange awareness that I was stepping into a world I had studied from afar but never truly inhabited. I remember the hotel corridors, the conference badge clipped to my jacket, the coffee in my hand, and the sight of students from across the country moving with the same combination of nerves and purpose. We had all come for the same reason: to understand how science enters public life. The workshop, held from April 12 to 15, 2026, at the Hyatt Regency Bethesda, was built precisely around that purpose: introducing students to science and technology policy, the federal budget process, congressional offices, advocacy, and communication in public life.
I came to the CASE Workshop as a student representative from Caltech expecting to learn how science policy worked. I left with something much larger than procedural knowledge. I left with a deeper understanding of how vulnerable the scientific enterprise really is, how much research depends on institutions outside the laboratory, and how closely science is tied to elective government and the legislative process in the United States. Before this experience, those words had a formal quality to me. In Washington, they became concrete. They became the committees, appropriations decisions, congressional offices, negotiations, and public arguments that determine whether research is funded, whether students are supported, and whether discovery is treated as a national priority or a political afterthought.
What made the workshop so powerful was that it was not passive. It did not ask us merely to admire policy from a distance. It asked us to practice inhabiting it. The agenda moved deliberately from introduction to instruction, from theory to application: science and technology policy, federal government overview, the federal budget process, congressional office operations, public opinion, science communication, and preparation for Hill visits. That structure mattered because it transformed policy from a distant abstraction into something lived. I was not simply learning vocabulary; I was learning how public systems shape the conditions under which science survives.
Representing Caltech sharpened that realization for me. Caltech is small, intense, and in many ways mythical—a place where difficulty is normal and intellectual seriousness is a way of life. But standing in Washington under Caltech’s name made me understand something I had not fully grasped before: even the most brilliant scientific community is not politically self-sustaining. Research depends not only on intelligence, labor, and imagination, but on appropriations bills, stable grant systems, visa structures, agency priorities, and public trust. It depends on whether lawmakers and the broader public continue to believe that funding knowledge is worth the cost, even when the return is not immediate. Representing Caltech therefore did not feel like carrying prestige into Washington. It felt like carrying obligation.
That obligation felt even more urgent because of the policy moment in which the workshop took place. The scientific atmosphere of spring 2026 was not neutral. Major federal research agencies were facing proposed cuts so deep that they would reshape the scale of American science. According to AIP, the FY2027 budget request proposed $4 billion for the National Science Foundation, a 54% cut from FY2026, alongside a dramatic contraction in the number of competitive awards. NSF projected it would fund only 2,900 competitive awards in FY2027, compared with 7,400 in FY2025, and estimated that the number of people directly involved in NSF programs and activities would fall by 69%. That is not just a budget adjustment. That is a transformation of scientific possibility. It means fewer grants, fewer fellowships, fewer experiments, fewer young researchers supported, and a quieter future for whole fields.
The scale of the proposed reductions extended well beyond NSF. AAU summarized that the proposal included $3.9 billion for NASA Science, a 46% cut, $41.43 billion for NIH, a 12% decrease, and $7.1 billion for the DOE Office of Science, a 13.5% cut from FY2026. AAU warned that cuts of this scale would significantly undermine America’s ability to conduct groundbreaking research, train the next generation of scientists and engineers, and compete with rival nations in strategic fields. What struck me especially was the irony that even programs connected to national priority areas would be hit: AIP reported cuts within NSF of 32% for AI and 37% for quantum information science, while AAU warned that these reductions would weaken U.S. leadership in areas such as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, information technology, and quantum science. Sitting in a room full of young researchers while reading those numbers, I felt how misleading percentages can be when stripped of their human meaning. In reality, those percentages are delayed careers, fewer open doors, postponed discoveries, and a generation told to innovate while being given less stability in which to do so.
One of the great strengths of the workshop was that it taught us how to read these realities structurally. Sessions on the federal budget process made clear that terms like authorization, appropriation, discretionary spending, and continuing resolutions are not merely technical words from a civics textbook. They are the grammar of scientific life in the United States. A continuing resolution is not only a legislative device; it is a form of uncertainty felt in real laboratories. Budget delays are experienced as postponed hiring, interrupted planning, frozen searches, and caution among trainees who are trying to build their future inside unstable institutions. Through the workshop, I learned not only about science policy, but about elective government and the legislative process as living systems that shape the tempo, mood, and possibility of research itself.
The workshop also taught me that policymaking is, at its core, an education in compromise. As scientists, we are trained to seek the best explanation, the cleanest argument, the strongest evidence. But governance is different. Governance asks what can pass, what can persuade, what can survive competing interests, and what can still protect the future even in diminished form. That was one of the most important lessons I took from CASE. I began to understand that advocacy is not only about correctness; it is about translation, strategy, and endurance. It is about knowing how to speak honestly in rooms where attention is short, priorities collide, and no one has the luxury of reading your methods section.
That insight was especially meaningful in the workshop’s emphasis on communication. Again and again, we were reminded that facts matter, but facts alone are rarely enough. A number may demonstrate a crisis, but a story makes it legible. A statistic may reveal a trend, but a voice makes it memorable. I found this lesson difficult at first, because as a scientist in training I want to believe that evidence should be sufficient. But science in democratic life requires more than evidence alone. It requires narrative, public trust, and the willingness to make research visible in human terms. The workshop helped me understand that storytelling is not a betrayal of rigor. It is one of the forms rigor must take if it is to survive outside the laboratory.
For me, as an international student, all of this carried another layer. My experience in Washington was not only about policy; it was also about belonging. There is something emotionally complex about standing in the capital of a country whose research institutions have shaped the modern world while also knowing how contingent one’s place within that world can be. That complexity has only intensified in recent years. The Institute of International Education reported in its Fall 2025 Snapshot that overall international student enrollment in U.S. higher education declined by 1%, while new international student enrollment fell by 17%. Graduate enrollment was down 12%, and non-degree enrollment down 17%. At the same time, 72% of institutions reported offering deferrals to spring 2026 and 56% offered deferrals to fall 2026, suggesting how much uncertainty students were navigating. Those numbers matter because they show that scientific and educational strength cannot be separated from a broader sense of institutional stability and welcome.
That may be why one of the most powerful parts of the trip happened outside the formal program. One night, after hours of budget charts, advocacy strategy, and policy language, I rode a scooter near the memorials. I still remember the slight vibration of the handlebars, the cool night air, the long avenues, and the pale stillness of the monuments. During the day, Washington had felt procedural: badges, schedules, acronyms, talking points, elevators, staffers. At night, it felt almost tender. The memorials seemed to hold light rather than reflect it. And in that quiet, everything I had been learning rearranged itself inside me. The city stopped feeling like a mechanism and started feeling like an inheritance.
It was there, on that scooter, that I felt most strongly what this trip meant to me personally. The little Italian girl going to DC. The phrase sounds almost playful, but for me it holds something serious and deeply emotional. I was really there: an international student, a scientist in training, a representative of Caltech, moving through the capital of the United States at a moment when the future of American science felt both astonishingly rich and undeniably precarious. I thought about what it means for a person from elsewhere to enter these spaces not as a tourist, but as a participant. I thought about how universities, fellowships, awards, and mentors can transform distant aspiration into lived experience. I thought about how extraordinary it was that a life once imagined from afar had, for a few days, become real.
What I brought back from the CASE Workshop was not a naïve faith in institutions. If anything, I came back with a more adult understanding of how fragile they are. But I also came back with a more disciplined hope. I learned that advocacy is not peripheral to science; it is one of the ways science remains answerable to the public that sustains it. I learned that researchers, including students, have a responsibility not only to discover, but also to explain, to testify, and to defend the conditions that make discovery possible. I learned that science does not remain strong simply because it deserves to. It remains strong when people are willing to speak for it.
That, finally, is what this experience gave me. It was a workshop, yes. But it was also a civic education, a political education, and a personal reckoning. I arrived thinking of advocacy as adjacent to science. I left understanding that it is part of the work itself. To understand science in America is to understand not only experiments and ideas, but also budgets, institutions, public trust, elective government, and the legislative process. Representing Caltech at CASE 2026 made me feel not only proud, but enlisted in a larger responsibility: to do serious science, and also to speak for the fragile public architecture that allows serious science to exist.
When I remember Washington now, I remember the sessions and the statistics, but I also remember the textures: the cool conference-room air, the weight of my badge against my shirt, the fatigue of long days, the rustle of printed materials, the brightness of hotel lights after dusk, the hush before entering important buildings, the memorials at night, and the feeling that for a few days I was living at the seam between private study and public consequence. Above all, I remember gratitude edged with urgency: gratitude that I was given the chance to learn this lesson from the inside, and urgency because the lesson itself was unmistakable.
I am profoundly grateful to The California Institute of Technology, and to those who endowed the Arnold O. Beckman Award, for making it possible for Caltech students to have this opportunity. Their generosity did not simply fund travel. It opened the door to an experience of intellectual, civic, and personal growth that I will carry with me for a long time.
I am sincerely thankful to the Caltech Y for administering the award and for selecting me to be an award recipient. Their support allowed me to participate in this workshop and to deepen my understanding of advocacy, public service, elective government, and the legislative process in the United States.
I am also deeply grateful to the Caltech Office of Communications and External Relations for agreeing to send me as a student representative of Caltech to the AAAS/CASE Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering Workshop. It was a privilege to represent the Institute in Washington, DC, and to witness firsthand how science, policy, and public life intersect.
Thank you, truly, to everyone who made this possible. For the opportunity, for the trust, and for the belief that students should be invited not only to do science, but also to understand and help defend the public world that makes science possible.
