Waynesburg native wins award for AmeriCorps service
Courtesy of Myles Cramer
Math can tell you the quickest route from point A to point B, though a mathematics degree normally wouldn’t seem like the fastest route to a career of service.
It was for Myles Cramer.
The Waynesburg native, who spent three service terms with AmeriCorps, was one of 11 honorees for this year’s Service Year Alums Awards.
The awards are given out by Service Year Alliance, a nonprofit working to promote the opportunity and expectation for young Americans to spend a year doing paid, full-time service.
He’s grateful for the honor. And he’s also thankful for the opportunity to let people know they can put their interests to use, whether it’s math or another interest that might seem like an unconventional match for service work.
“It’s not like going and studying social worker education, just as an example,” he said. “But you can still take that skill set, and really apply it to whatever problems you see in your community.”
Cramer had been introduced to the idea of AmeriCorps while getting his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Penn State University.
He was on an “alternative spring break” service program in the Atlanta area helping to resettle refugees when he met a member of AmeriCorps VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America).
Cramer had become familiar with the idea of devoting a year or two of your life to a service project from the example of his uncle, who had served in the Peace Corps. But this was the first time where he’d learned of the idea of a career path involving paid service work.
“I was kind of at the point where I was like, ‘What do I do next? How do I figure out how to have an impactful career while still using this math background that I was building at Penn State?'” he said. “And I found AmeriCorps.”
He applied in November 2019 knowing he was going to take a gap year after spring 2020 — fortuitous timing for avoiding a year of college during the pandemic.
In July 2020, he started with AmeriCorps VISTA as a data analyst for the College Mentors for Kids program, which pairs college students with elementary-school children for educational activities and exploring different careers.
As the program was building up a virtual mentoring model during COVID, it still had to report on the services it was delivering.
He helped them adapt their surveys to the virtual format, tracking whether students were getting everything they needed to engage with the program’s new era.
Cramer also uncovered an aptitude for grant writing. He helped acquire $11,000 in direct grants and in-kind donations, including $5,000 in in-kind donations for building a database for how people registered for the program as a family or college student.
He put his skills to use in another way in AmeriCorps’ Conservation Legacy, where he was part of the projects through the Scientists in Parks program.
First, he helped tackle how to use artificial intelligence to better decode what frogs appeared on field recordings. As they’re especially sensitive to changes in the environment, the number and species of the frogs that show up can help researchers track the long-term health of natural resources.
Cramer took the audio clips and converted them to spectrograms, which visually represent the sounds. Through machine learning, a program could be trained to recognize the spectrogram reading to denote a particular species, such as a spring keeper.
He worked on that project remotely while wrapping up his undergraduate degree. His second project took him out in the field — more specifically, to the top of Mount Rushmore.
During a summer in Rapid City, S.D., he worked as an acoustic assistant on a project monitoring low-flying aircraft around Mount Rushmore and the Badlands.
Constant helicopter tours of the area led to federal legislation in the early 2000s led to an air tour management plan to protect the natural soundscape of the park.
He helped explore the best places to put aircraft monitors to enforce the plans, as well as collecting baseline data on the noise produced by the helicopters and the ambient sound level produced at key tourist areas.
The top of Mount Rushmore was one of the places being considered. Cramer got to go up with some park rangers to help install the box.
“I was up there, and it was the coolest thing ever,” he said.
His current role at a Pittsburgh-based tech company gives him the same feeling of working for a “small, scrappy team” trying to change the world, Cramer said. Being in AmeriCorps also meant he was able to get out of grad school without crushing debt, which helped him take a bigger swing with his career.
The things he learned at AmeriCorps are carrying over to his new job.
Starting a job during the pandemic gave him a greater familiarity with Zoom. And it showed him the impact he can have on lives with data.
It’s also taught him about the experiences people are having around the world, and letting him make connections around the country.
While he was in South Dakota, he got a text from his mother about a student of one of her friends in Greene County who was interested in being a wildlife scientist.
Because of his new role, a roomful of kids from Waynesburg were able to hop on a Zoom call with a National Park Service ecologist who worked at Mount Rushmore.
“It’s these types of connections that I’ve been able to make with people that I never would have met otherwise, and continuing to try to bring those connections back to Waynesburg and the greater Pittsburgh area,” Cramer said. “It really has shaped how I see the world and how I’ve taken those next steps professionally.”