Editor’s note: Ved Srinivasan was part of GLOW’s Summer 2026 Health-AI-Impact Lab, an 8-week virtual program where students use systems thinking, evidence-based research and AI to tackle public health challenges. This cohort focused on youth aging out of the foster care system. Along the way, students learned from experts including the Honorable Jaya Badiga, Judge of the Sacramento County Superior Court. Below, Ved reflects on how that experience changed the way he thinks.
Growing up, I have always been a person to question the things around me from the science behind my electric guitar to the landscape design of my yard. Finding the right answer to a question—either through my own logical analysis or through a quick Google search—was truly something that forever felt satisfying. As I got older, my curiosity began to delve deeper into the normative—what ought to be and why—in hopes of creating a better tomorrow.
This interest has not only pushed me to pursue philosophy and law but also is what drew me to GLOW, a global nonprofit that empowers youth to create impactful solutions for underrepresented communities. As someone who has valued learning their whole youth, I immediately felt for GLOW’s current focus: helping kids aging out of the foster care system.
However, my initial instincts on this problem were very narrow. I felt there was a clear knowledge gap that inhibited the foster youth from experiencing the full opportunities the United States had to offer and thought alleviating that gap would instantly bring justice to the entire situation. My solution was simply to help with some kind of information management system to rectify issues with the foster youth.
That’s when GLOW introduced me to Judge Badiga who told me all about the court’s perspective on these issues. As someone who has been competing in mock trials for three years now and aspiring to be a future lawyer, I was sure I was going to hear another defense of the court’s use of moral rationalism. However, Judge Badiga instead talked to me about how the court system actually operates on limited, managed information that determines life-altering decisions. Judge Badiga went on to say that there was a clear “margin of error” in judicial decisions due to the filtered evidence coming in, causing systemic issues like a lack of institutional support.
With this new insight, I began to rethink the Kantian rationalist philosophy I have readily embraced. I had always found comfort in the idea that reason could provide a consistent framework for determining right and wrong, regardless of circumstance. Yet, Judge Badiga’s perspective challenged me to consider what happens when the information necessary to apply those principles is incomplete. How could a decision be morally unambiguous when the facts it is based upon were inherently limited and do not provide the full picture? In light of this, I began exploring situational ethics, recognizing that moral judgment requires more than just applying universal rules and necessitates understanding multiple contextual perspectives.
I carried this realization with me to other fields at GLOW. I recognized that a by-the-book research method such as a randomized controlled trial has underlying trade-offs between scientific rigor and ethical responsibility: notably, withholding a potentially beneficial treatment from a control group may strengthen the validity of a study at the cost of delaying access to care for those participants, a trade-off fundamentally rooted in the question of how much a human life really is worth. From this, I learned the importance of framing research, highlighting different lenses and variables depending on the stakeholders, a skill very applicable in legal and political careers.
Empowered by this experience with GLOW and Judge Badiga, I started writing policy recommendations on the foster care issue, advocating directly for children’s mental health interests. Writing these recommendations have changed how I approach questions I would once think as straightforward. Rather than simply asking things like how to improve a system, I now try to investigate what context is missing, which stakeholders bear the costs of a policy, and what its unintended consequences might be. As I continue studying law and philosophy, I want to pair legal reasoning with research that tests the assumptions behind it, while continuing to develop impactful policies with GLOW. I still find satisfaction in finding answers, but now, I’ve learned that asking the right questions can be just as meaningful.
About the author: Ved Srinivasan is a member of GLOW’s Summer 2026 Health-AI-Impact Lab and a three-year mock trial competitor who plans to study law and philosophy. He is writing policy recommendations on foster youth mental health with GLOW.
Read more from the 2026 cohort: The Gap Between a Resource and the Person Who Needs It by Simona Canale
