Year in Review

A year ago today, I stood on the cusp of an internship that concerned me for several reasons. One, it was at a local charter school–whose work I did admire, but as the daughter of two public school teachers, I found myself feeling rather averse to charter schools in general. Two, I had been finding myself increasingly pigeonholed into education-related internships and activities, and I was worried that education wasn’t the field I wanted to be in. And three, it was set to involve heavy use of computers and “data analysis.” I’ve always been the friend who can’t be left alone with any form of technology for fear of me breaking it (see: Excel spreadsheets, laptops, Xboxes, television remotes, etc), so an internship based around computer skills was rather daunting to me.

Yet once my internship at KIPP Columbus began, I found myself enthralled with their admirable work, forgetting any previous charter school woes to just admire the amazing things they do for their students, and (forgive the pun) EXCELling at the tasks they gave me. The internship helped me to learn how much I actually do enjoy data analysis. The test score analyses that I was doing then went on to provide a basis for reports and actions taken by the school as a whole. It was thrilling work for me, and I realized I’d found a new career path.

The past year has seen our country take a very dark turn politically, and I’ve found myself increasingly less interested in any sort of political leadership roles. Instead, through my internship at KIPP Columbus and the data analysis I’ve been doing for my independent research thesis, I’ve discovered a niche that suits me much better. With the mass of data available at our fingertips, I’ve realized I want to go into the field of policy analysis. I want to be one of the people running the numbers and creating reports for those political leaders to learn from–as clearly, policy research has become more important now than ever if our society is to replace misinformation/fake news with sound ideas.

To pursue this, I will be interning at the Government Accountability Office’s Health Care Policy team in Washington, D.C. this summer–and I couldn’t be more excited.