Project Assistant at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Project Assistant

Over this past summer, I had an amazing opportunity to work on a project with Timothy Pinkston the Vice Dean of Faculty Affairs in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Yannis Yortsos who is the head Dean of Engineering proposed the initial project. The goal was to create an Excel database to develop an analysis of how competitive USC’s Engineering Department is to other top universities.

Team

Our team comprised of four members each with a different background. Emily majored in Environmental Science, Kamren majored in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, Vaishnavi majored in Computer Science, and I majored in Business Administration. Emily was the head supervisor of this project. She recruited everyone on our team. Bringing diversity into the team gave us the advantage to use our skills to the best of our ability.

We researched seven universities including:

·      Northwestern

·      Columbia

·      Princeton

·      Rice University

·      Stanford University

·      University of California, Berkeley

·      University of Michigan

The Project 

The first step in developing our database was figuring out whether we should separate each member with one school or work together on each university. This part is like deciding what ingredients to put on a cake. It was interesting to see how Vaishnavi wanted to work individually, where Emily and I thought it would be better to work together. Vaishnavi’s background in Computer Science concentrated her projects in many individual based settings making it comfortable for her to work by herself. In contrast, Emily and I worked on many group projects with team-based settings. Emily made the final decision to work together on each school. At the end of each week, we would have weekly meetings about our progress and identify interesting trends we found in our research. Working together was the better choice in the end because we faced many challenges with each school as we progressed.

Cracking the List

One of the challenges we faced was working with unclear data. We had to create a list of tenured faculty for associate, assistant, and full-time professors. The next step was to record where they obtained their Ph.Ds., and what kind of the awards they received through their curriculum vitae. As we researched each school we saw that some professors did not have all their information posted online. To overcome this obstacle, we created a master document with a list of awards that we wanted to accept into our data. The goal was to use the master document to compare it with the universities. It was almost like a checklist for seeing what awards we thought were important to USC.

The master document composed of five separate awards sections including:

·      Early Career Faculty Awards or Honors

·      Cross-Disciplinary Professional

·      Disciplinary Professional Society Fellows

·      Professional Society Prizes, Awards, Honors, and Medals

·      National Academies

Analysis

After seven weeks of heavy data mining, we finally finished creating our database. Our next step was to make these numbers and data meaningful. This part of the project was like getting ready to bake a pie after you have mixed all the ingredients. We took all the data and turned it into percentages so we could see the proportions of awards gathered. One key takeaway that we found was that many professors had more early career awards compared to the four other award sections. The majority of professor also got their Ph.Ds. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Visual Presentation

As our project came to an end, we had to make our data look presentable. We used the majority of the last few weeks of summer cleaning up our numbers and information. It’s like polishing your shoes before you go into an interview. Our information was all in one file, so it would be easy for Dean Yortsos to view everything. Charts and percentages made our analysis easier to read and understand.

Key Takeaways

My overall experience working on this project over the past summer gave me a lot of insight into what it’s like to do research for a university. I gained a better understanding of what it means to develop analysis and explore trends. It was interesting to see how you could turn simple data and numbers into something important and useful. Working with people in diverse academic backgrounds also gave me the opportunity to see and learn the different working styles people attain. Lastly, being a project assistant sharpened my excel skills and allowed me to gain more technical skills.

Passive: 0%

Reading Ease: 53.2

Reading Level: 10