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John Glenn College of Public Affairs
Ohio Education Research Center
Interns
The Public Sector Data Science Internship Program is an internship for rising juniors and seniors in the Glenn College and is a collaboration between the OERC, Glenn College and CHRR. Students interested in exploring careers in policy research and evaluation receive instruction from Glenn Faculty and Staff on investigating policy problems through data analysis. The students are then partnered with a state agency in Columbus where they will work on a project for the Summer, culminating in a presentation of work at the end of the Summer. More information about the internship program can be found on the Glenn College website. Past years interns can be viewed at the bottom of this page.
The Ohio Education Research Center (OERC) hosts the Public Sector Data Science Internship for students at The Ohio State University. The program is designed for students interested in exploring careers in policy research and evaluation and in using data-based methods to investigate policy problems. Students will be assigned to a partner state agency in Columbus, Ohio for the summer. The chief goal of the program is to offer ways to explore the exciting work that the OERC and its affiliated partners are engaged in and to give students practical experience with the theory they learn in college classes.
In-agency Internship
Interns will be assigned to a state agency research office in Columbus, Ohio for the summer ( mid-May through the end of July). Working with agency staff and OERC mentors, students will conduct applied research on policy-relevant topics using administrative, survey, and geospatial data.
Partner agencies may include:
- Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
- Ohio Department of Higher Education
- Ohio Department of Education / Education & Workforce
- Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities
- Ohio Housing Finance Agency
Projects are designed to support agency decision-making and may include data cleaning, exploratory analysis, visualization, evaluation, and documentation of findings.
Learning Lab
During the agency internship, students will participate in a weekly seminar with OERC staff/faculty. These weekly seminar sessions will serve as a “learning lab” – where students can get help from staff on ongoing issues that arise in the internship site and hear from various guest speakers in the data science field.
Research Presentation
Students in the internship will be expected to present their research at the end of the summer to an audience of the OERC staff and agency partners.
2026 Interns
Jiwon Son
Ohio Department of Higher Education
Ben Jordan
Ohio Housing Finance Agency
Ben Jordan is a third-year International Studies major with minors in Statistics and Business. This summer, he is working at the Ohio Housing Finance agency in the Office of Research & Analytics. In addition to assisting with regular data work, he utilizes the Ohio Human Services Data Warehouse to better understand homelessness and behavioral health in Ohio.
Cassie Yuan
Ohio Department of Education and Workforce
Cassie Yuan is a third-year Data Analytics major at The Ohio State University, specializing in Public Health and Biomedical Informatics. During the summer, she worked with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce in the Office of Research, Evaluation and Advanced Analytics, where she analyzed school district expenditure data using R. In this role, she cleaned and integrated fiscal year and demographic datasets, generated visualizations, applied clustering techniques, and identified patterns that depict how districts aligned or differed in their spending behaviors.
Bardaan Dhesi
Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
Bardaan Dhesi is a third-year Data Analytics student with a specialization in Computational Analytics. This summer, he interned with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to evaluate the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) for Ohio. He focused on supporting development of an ROI metric that utilizes statistical and machine learning methodologies to determine change in outcomes for program recipients. He shares “I am excited to pursue my intersecting interests in data science and public policy on a real-world project that has implications for thousands of Ohioans like myself.”
Archived Interns
Zachary Howes
Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
Zachary Howes is a fourth-year Public Policy Analysis major with minors in Economics and International Studies. This summer, he worked with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services (ODJFS) in the Labor Market Information Bureau (LMI), where he assisted in skill analysis research projects. He analyzed skill & credential data from job postings using RStudio and Tableau to create dashboards and created natural language processing scripts for analyzing job postings data.
Floria Liu
Ohio Department of Higher Education
Floria Liu is a fourth-year student majoring in Marketing with minors in Business Analytics and Communication Technology. This summer, she worked with the Ohio Department of Higher Education, where she supported data integrity and system improvement across multiple projects. A key focus involved assessing the quality of educator preparation program reporting. Using SQL and R, she diagnosed issues related to data accuracy and consistency across multiple sources. She also helped identify errors in a public-facing Tableau dashboard, contributing to improvements in the reliability of information shared with both internal stakeholders and the public.
Yaqi Zhang
Ohio Department of Education and Workforce
Yaqi Zhang is a third-year Statistics major with a minor in Business Analytics at The Ohio State University. This summer, she interned with the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, where she analyzed county-level college-going patterns using data from the National Student Clearinghouse. She applied R programming and Power BI to conduct data analysis and develop interactive visualizations.
Killian Hoyt
Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities
Killian Hoyt is a third-year student pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Political Science, with minors in Public Policy and Spanish. He interned this summer with Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities (OOD) to assess the Vocational Rehabilitation program. His analysis focused on participants that return for OOD services to better understand trends within the served population. Killian used R, Tableau, Tableau Prep Builder, and Excel to investigate data from OOD’s case management system. He used these tools to clean, organize, and present the data to help OOD better forecast returning participants.
Ella Busch
Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities
Ella Busch is a fourth-year Public Policy Analysis major with minors in French and Local Government. This Summer she worked with Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities to assist with their Comprehensive Statewide Needs Assessment. She examined the areas where there were gaps or delays in vocational rehabilitation services using Microsoft Excel and Tableau.
Isabelle Frohlich
Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
Isabelle Frohlich is in the second year of her Master's of Public Administration degree in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. This summer, she worked with the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services with data from the Comprehensive Case Management and Employment Program. She transformed and visualized the data by barriers, demographics, and program years to better understand how the program is performing and who it is serving.
Samuel Gadkar
Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
Samuel Gadkar is a third-year student majoring in Data Analytics and minoring in Economics. This summer, he worked with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services on their Re-employment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA). Samuel gathered and joined data involving unemployment, SNAP, and RESEA in SQL and made visualizations in Tableau. The visualizations provided a better understanding of who is being covered by RESEA and which individuals potentially can be included in RESEA.
Elizabeth Yirava
Ohio Housing Finance Agency
Elizabeth Yirava is a third-year student majoring in Statistics and Public Policy Analysis. This summer, she worked with the Ohio Housing Finance Agency to create maps based on Ohio Department of Education data to assist with the allocation of housing tax credits. Elizabeth also worked with CHRR to create a dashboard and visualizations for the Higher Education Employment Data. Her dream career is working with public and education data.
Cordelia Van der Veer
Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities
Cordelia Van der Veer is a second-year student majoring in Public Policy Analysis with a minor in Political Science. This summer, she worked with Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities (OOD) to analyze apprenticeship data and match OOD participants to potential programs. Her dream career would be working as a Policy Researcher or to be a Professor.
Zaida Jenkins
Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
Zaida Jenkins is a second year Master of Public Administration Student at the Glenn College. This summer, she worked with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to analyze data on their Comprehensive Case Management and Employment Program (CCMEP) focused on enrollment trends and participant demographics. Her dream career is to be a Local Government Official.
Tiana Stussie
Ohio Department of Job and Family Services
Tiana Stussie recently completed her bachelor's degree in Public Policy Analysis with a minor in Public Health and will be pursuing an additional minor in mathematics. Throughout her undergraduate career, she researched the role social and economic policies have on health outcomes. Ms. Stussie interned with the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to analyze the dynamics of the labor market using Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data.
Qiqi Ding
Ohio Department of Higher Education
Qiqi Ding is a fourth-year Economics major and Math minor from Zhejiang, China. She was a volunteer of AIESEC Cambodia and worked for the Cross-National Equivalent File on COVID-19 policy collection. Ms. Ding interned with the Ohio Department of Higher Education analyzing their facilities data.
Ian Montgomery
Ohio Department of Education
Ian Montgomery is a third-year Economics Major and English Minor from Columbus, Ohio. He has previously worked in marketing at Sycamore Growth Group as well as in tax at Nationwide Insurance. In his free time, Mr. Montgomery enjoys being involved with fundraising efforts in Central Ohio. Mr. Montgomery interned with the Ohio Department of Education on a project to identify positive outlier schools.
Sarah Stouffer-Lerch
Ohio Housing Finance Agency
Sarah Stouffer-Lerch is a fourth-year Public Policy Analysis major from Madison, Wisconsin. Prior to this role, Ms. Stouffer-Lerch has conducted research on historical housing policy at various cultural heritage institutions. Ms. Stouffer-Lerch interned with the Ohio Housing Finance Agency to analyze trends and funding patterns in their Save the Dream program.
Evelyn Arrey
Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities
Evelyn Arrey is a second-year Ph.D. Fulbright Student from the ISE Department with an Industrial Engineering major. She is a faculty member at Universidad Catolica del Norte in Chile. In her past experience, she has worked as a research assistant, data analyst, and teaching assistant. Ms. Arrey interned with Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities analyzing co-enrollment data in Ohio workforce programs.
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Jarod Wade
Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities
Jarod Wade is a rising senior from Cleveland, Ohio majoring in Public Policy Analysis at Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs. Jarod is a passionate LGBTQ rights advocate and has dedicated time to create inclusive spaces for people with disabilities within the Residence Halls at Ohio State. He will be analyzing data for the Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities office this summer to better understand employment disparities in Ohio.
Stacy George
Ohio Housing Finance Agency
Stacy George is an incoming third year student from Canton, Ohio. At Ohio State, she is studying Public Policy through the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and Economics within the College of Arts and Sciences. Ms. George has a background in qualitative data research centered around the study of community identities within Ohio and abroad. This summer she will be analyzing data for The Ohio Housing Finance Agency to understand the effects of low-income housing on neighborhoods.
Aaron Kelley
Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services
Aaron Kelley is a rising fourth year student at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, pursuing a double major in Public Management, Leadership, and Policy and Political Science, with a specialization in Political Analysis. He is originally from Akron, Ohio. This summer, Aaron will be working with the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services, tracking the outcomes of various pathways taken by veterans in Ohio following their separation from the military.
Natalie Hurst
Ohio Department of Education
Natalie Hurst is a rising senior in Ohio State’s Honors College studying Public Policy Analysis with a minor in Molecular Genetics. As a first-generation college student who grew up in a rural village with less than 1,000 people, Ms. Hurst is passionate about connecting fellow low-income and minority students with career and higher education opportunities. She currently holds roles at I Am My Brother’s Keeper-Columbus, the Women’s Fund of Central Ohio, and the OSU Chapter of College Mentors for Kids. In the past, she has conducted stem cell research at Ohio State, Stanford, and Harvard University. She is exceedingly excited to conduct policy research at the Ohio Department of Education this summer studying the College Credit Plus program.
Benjamin Stone
Ohio Department of Higher Education
Benjamin Stone is a rising senior majoring in Economics and Public Policy Analysis at Ohio State University. Born and raised in central Ohio, he has experience working as a research assistant on both the Education Governance and Accountability Project through the John Glenn College, and the Government Financial Health over Time Project through the Sociology Department in the College of Arts and Sciences. This summer, Benjamin will be interning with the Ohio Department of Higher Education as a data analytics intern to study the College Credit Plus program experience and how it impacts college enrollment and completion.
2017 Intern Group Photo
Kacie Ziemann, “Using National Student Clearinghouse Data to Track Ohio High School Graduates”
Meghan Collyer “Impact of Foundational Course Performance on Graduation Rates”
Levi Griffith “A Look at Rent to Own Housing in Ohio”
Daniel Gluck “Financial Analysis of WIOA Recipients in Ohio”