Elizabeth Yirava

The Ohio Education Research Center — a collaborative of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and the CHRR — offers the Public Sector Data Science Internship Program for students interested in exploring careers in policy research and evaluation. This year, we were very excited to host three interns at state agencies across Columbus. Continue reading to learn more about the work they accomplished this summer.

Our next intern of the week is Elizabeth Yirava. Ms. Yirava is going into her third year studying Statistics and Public Policy Analysis at OSU and interned with OHFA this summer where she was directly involved in a project focused on housing tax credits. Her reflections on the internship are shared below:

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Yirava. I’m a third year Statistics and Public Policy Analysis student at the John Glenn College. This summer, I’m interning with OHFA (Ohio Housing Finance Agency). I’ve had an interest in using math and data to create policy and solve public problems since I began college, and the PSDS internship seemed like a great way to develop my data analytics skills.

For my project, I’m working on creating maps based on ODE (Ohio Department of Education) data to assist with allocation of housing tax credits. For this analysis, I’ve created visualizations in Tableau and used Excel and R for further analysis. The maps contain Ohio Department of Education report card data for each district represented in a visual form.

As another part of my internship, I’m working with the OERC Higher Education Employment data and creating visualizations based on an analysis of this dataset. I’m exploring the general demographic information and questions such as the relationship between top industries and earnings. Additionally, I am looking at how different career paths have evolved over time.

My favorite thing about this internship was getting to know the other interns and learning about other public sector data positions through the Friday seminars. While I’ve struggled with the nebulous nature of an internship and pivoting from very clean, sterile datasets to messier public datasets, I’ve definitely learned a lot throughout the course of this internship. I would recommend the PSDS program to anyone interested in learning more about Ohio agencies and government with an affinity for numbers and data.