Lauren Lewallen has enthusiastically served on the Winter 2022 Graduate Student Instructor team for the QMSS 201 course. Lauren is currently a graduate student in the U of M School of Education in the Higher Education Program. Her specific concentration is in Management and Organizations, which means she has the opportunity to take many classes through the Ross School of Business as well. Lauren grew up in Michigan and received her undergraduate degree from Central Michigan University where she majored in elementary education and also studied history and political science. Before coming to U of M for graduate school, she worked as an 8th grade U.S. history teacher in Macomb, MI. During this time she had the opportunity to do some work for the school district analyzing data on many educational factors such as retention rates and class popularity. This experience prompted her to come to graduate school and to focus on higher education. It also showed her the importance of QMSS skills.

Lauren’s experiences are a perfect example of how quantitative methods and data skills are relevant in almost any field. While her degree and career mostly focused on education, she found that data management and data analysis skills were used everywhere to create knowledge and information about the topic at hand. This is what excited her about being a QMSS GSI. Whether your primary interest is in education or policy or psychology, she appreciates that anyone can benefit from the QMSS curriculum. Currently, as a part of her work as a graduate student she has had to analyze data about postsecondary education. She has particularly enjoyed using Tableau to present her work.

At Michigan, Lauren also works with the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life as a Co-Interim Advisor for the Interfraternity Council (IFC) cohort of chapter presidents and executive board members. She does a lot of data analysis in this position as well. For example, recently, half the fraternities at Michigan disaffiliated after the institution’s primary recruitment period was moved from fall to winter. Lauren is acting as advisor to a team of students working on a comparative analysis to investigate if the seasonal switch has actually led to the improvements it was anticipated to create in safety and therefore is justified even given the cost to organizational participation. The project is mostly student run, but Lauren has shared her data collection and analysis skills with the students who come from many educational backgrounds. In fact, Lauren says that many students on the project expressed interest in QMSS after she told them about the minor.

Lauren is a huge proponent of the QMSS program. She posits that, not only do students learn many computing and visualization skills, they also gain hands-on experience solving problems or answering questions with data. An event which she believed highlighted this was the recent Viz’d event where students were given the same data sets but created very unique visualizations. Lauren also loves that QMSS is home to students with unique educational backgrounds and career goals, yet everyone benefits from the curriculum.

This summer, Lauren will be interning at the University of California-Berkeley within their Office of Fraternity Life and will be serving as a curriculum developer. She looks forward to using data to inform, shape, and improve various policies and programming within this department at Cal. In the future, Lauren hopes to get a PhD and wants to continue to focus on post-secondary education. QMSS has heightened her interest in understanding how to improve educational systems with the support of data.