At the start of week two, I made a typical college student decision to get Chinese food for dinner. You know how in movies, the fortune cookie always says something incredibly relevant to the main character’s life, but in real life, your fortune cookie never really says anything worthwhile? Maybe I’ve accidentally stepped into a movie, because my fortune was eerily on point with my life.

“Children will play an important role in your life.” Although the students at KIPP are gone for the summer, my job still revolves entirely around them. Mostly, I’m working with a lot of data. Before this fellowship, I viewed “data” as a mostly abstract concept. But data is what makes the world go ’round these days, and learning the in’s and out’s of how to use it is fascinating.

When a little kid thinks of “fun things to do,” taking a test is definitely not the first (…or second, or hundredth) activity that comes to mind. But their test scores are infinitely valuable to their schools. Is the school achieving their desired results? How much is the school really helping its students? Are they improving from year to year? What I’ve been doing is creating spreadsheets and graphs that describe KIPP’s students: their strengths, their weaknesses, and their growth patterns over the years. KIPP then takes this information and uses it to determine the specific changes it can make to improve the performance of its students.

It’s so exciting to be creating reports that are both in such high demand and are so useful to KIPP. And on a more personal note, I know that learning how to interpret and use data is a vital career skill that I’ll be using for the rest of my life! (Plus, as nerdy as this sounds, I’m actually having so much fun learning all the cool shortcuts and tricks of Google Sheets.)