Project

As my final quarter at the University of Washington was approaching, I wanted to do something that would make an impact in my department. As I had already completed all the necessary classes for my major, I decided to instead do a survey study in order to understand how the department communicated with the undergraduate population and how this communication can be improved.

Survey

The survey was relatively short and took under ten minutes to complete. With the help of the department, I was able to send out the survey to all students who had taken a class in the Germanics department within the last year. From this, I received almost 100 responses which I had to sort through and clean up the data before analyzing it further.

The clean-up took the longest and I learned a lot from the process. I had never done anything like it before and I quickly realized mistakes I made which I now would hopefully not make again. The biggest difficulty was correcting all the manual input data which was the same, but the spreadsheet did not recognize as being the same due to different spellings, capitalizations, abbreviations, etc.

Data Visualizations

The data visualizations in the report were made by Tableau. As I had never used this software before, it took me a little bit to understand how to use it. Once I got acquainted with it, I was able to make simple visualizations that would help the department better understand the data I was providing them with.

Presenting the findings

In my role as undergraduate student representative, I was often invited to attend faculty meetings when issues of the undergraduate program were on the agenda. Due to this, I had the opportunity to present my report to the whole faculty at the final meeting of the quarter. As a thank you for the hard work during my final quarter, I was presented the award for “Exceptional dedication to the Germanics Department” upon my graduation.