Assessment & Data Analytics KG

By Cami Hernandez Merhar, Assistant Director, Mentoring Texas A&M Career Center

Now more than ever data is extremely important. We need it to make informed decisions about how we navigate this new COVID 19 world not only personally but professionally.

Although the circumstances we currently find ourselves in are dire, I find a little hope in what we’ve been able to accomplish through data collection and analysis.

One of my favorite examples is the US Health Weather Map, made public by the digital thermometer maker, Kinsa. Access to data they collect from their digital thermometers and the accompanying app allows us to see “Atypical Illness [which] refers to an unusual incidence of elevated flu-like illness levels” that can be caused by not only by COVID 19, but other factors such as “Increased healthcare seeking behavior in light of the COVID-19 pandemic” and “Seasonally abnormal cold/flu viruses circulating in particular communities.”

As of March they have switched their way of collecting data to “reflect the cumulative amount of atypical illnesses we’ve observed since March 1 — previously this map reflected only new atypical illness, updated daily. As widespread social distancing measures take effect, feverish illness levels are dropping, and we feel this way of looking at the data gives a more accurate and comprehensive view of what’s happening.”

This give me great hope that the small acts we do like social distancing and improving our hygiene by increasing the frequency of hand washing is working to slow the spread of this illness. We must continue to physically distant ourselves in order to spare as many lives as we can.

But let’s switch gears to student career readiness.

In my small area of data and insight I know there has been a small surge of Texas A&M’s new automated resume feedback tool, Vmock. This data is still preliminary as we still have cross reference this to past data, but my hypothesis is as we move into a virtual space, students will naturally seek guidance with online tools in comparison to manual ones like phone calls. We want to hear from you. How have you transitioned onto digital places and how are you quantifying the impact you’re having with your students during this new time? What brings you hope and happiness at times like this? Email us at mchmerhar@tamu.edu and let us know!

By Cami Hernandez Merhar, Texas A&M University Career Center

Data is everywhere. But the consistent challenge with data is you need to be able to understand it, process it, extract value from it, visualize it, and then finally make actionable decisions from it. College-level career advising seems to be the least likely place you would find a mountain of data, but you would be surprised.

Recently, I volunteered to be a part of revamping our Career Center’s website, careercenter.tamu.edu. I had initially joined the revamp website committee from a content perspective, but as we sat in our initial meeting the discussion turned into a bigger conversation around how can we best serve our students through our website? How can we deliver value and meet the needs of our constituents effectively?

Ideas began to circulate. We all agreed that the biggest need was to update the content of the website, but from there it became trickier. We then began to ask ourselves which content should we prioritize? People had feelings on what should come first and what was most important but no one could agree on a direction.

It was at that moment that Abdullah, my colleague and the Chair of the Assessment and Data Analytics (ADA) KG, piped up and thought of a way to even the playing field: data. 

I immediately thought of an article about Peter Neupert, a successful CEO and a board member of various medical and technology companies, who had the extreme fortune of shadowing both Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. In the article he stated, “I learned quickly from those days that opinions don’t matter…Data matters.” 

We began looking at the top questions students had asked using our Chatbot data, which is a recent addition to the technological ecosystem. We’ve installed the Chatbot to our website in order to help students get to the information they want quickly. From there we also agreed to integrate a survey on our website after a student spent 2 minutes on our website, and now we’ve added Google Analytics to gain insight into our most visited pages, the different entry points into our website and how our users currently interact with our website. 

What did we find? Students overwhelmingly wanted information on how to create/improve their resumes/ cover letters, schedule appointments, find jobs, career fair dates, externship opportunities, and help with interviews. Some of the insights we gathered were not obvious and we realized that some of this information is not so easily accessible on our website. 

Currently, we’re still figuring out how these insights will translate to updates to the website, but we are far smarter and know exactly what our students want. 

Now we want to hear from you and reward you! As ADA Chairs we want to learn what tools and methods you’re utilizing in your office.

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