My internship this summer at Building Changes, an affordable housing nonprofit organization, was such an interesting experience. My role in the organization for three months was to learn about and develop an evaluation tool for one of the local programs that Building Changes had funded for three years through two grants—the Family Self-Sufficiency Program at a local public housing authority. Although Building Changes had funded the project, the organization only knew the desired outcome of the program, and not its actual components or the theory behind the program.

One of my tasks was to figure out how the program worked and relay this to my supervisors at Building Changes before developing a way to analyze the program’s success, which would give the program a better chance at receiving future funding and supply information for Building Changes and Building Changes’ donors (most of their grant funding comes from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and federal sources) about the success of the funding that they provide.

To evaluate the program, I identified the main areas of the program: goal fulfillment, income progression, receipt of public assistance, and program graduation. Using data from the program’s files, I compiled a database of income information, public assistance amounts, goal fulfillment, and graduation rates and developed a series of reports that can be easily run again in the future. Using data reporting software, I compiled a preliminary report on whether or not the Family Self-Sufficiency Program (FSS) program was on track to fulfill its goals and worked with FSS program staff to perfect the data evaluation program and draw concrete conclusions about the program’s success thus far. It was a very steep learning curve to get used to the data software (Crystal Reports and YARDI) that the agency used, especially since they were new to most of the staff there as well, but it was an exciting challenge to figure out how to apply my statistical skills gained in my coursework at Scripps to new kinds of data in a completely different setting.

Although Building Changes and the public housing agency will have to wait another year for new data to be collected and compared to measure progress of the program, the FSS program seems to be on track with other FSS programs in similarly-sized cities. In addition, the housing agency that I worked closely with has shared the data analysis reports that I developed to other agencies with FSS programs that use the same software. Those agencies can use the reports I developed to do similar data analysis, even if the goals for their particular program differ slightly, the reports provide information on all aspects of the program and use the data that all public housing agencies are collect annually.

The work I did this summer felt so intellectually exhausting at the time, but it was so exciting to see the work I did come together at the end of the summer. Although I didn’t get a feel for what the day-to-day work of an actual data analyst does because the project I did was so specific, I learned so much about program evaluation and gained useful skills for future work with data. I love working with data and this summer was such a reassurance that I will have career opportunities to use that passion in ways that deeply impact people.

Editor’s Note: This guest blogger was a 2014 Scripps College Internship Grant recipient. To learn more about the 2015 Internship Grant process, click here.  Deadline Feb. 5.