During my time as a volunteer analyst for the Modern Military Association of America, I completed an analysis of the organization's case report data. This involved data cleaning, transformation, visualization, and reporting. The goal was to assist the organization with quantifying their progress towards goals and to help set new, realistic ones. This role was essentially a consulting role where I had to meet and discuss with non-technical stakeholders what exactly it was that they wanted out of an analysis, and then provide them with an analysis that fit this bill.
The data used in the analysis was a csv with each entry representing a respondant's answers given to fill out a google sheet. There were around 1000 responses over the period of the previous year at the time of the analysis. These responses were manually logged into excel and exported as a csv. The shape and content of the data wasn't easy to work with initially, wiith many issues stemming from the form allowing for free-text responses. Steps were taken to alleviate this. Problems encountered:
As this was my first full-time role as an analyst, I spent a lot of time refining my skills with the tools in the company's stack and learned how to work efficiently in an agile, corporate environment. Here are the key tools in the stack as well as how they were used:
This role was a great opportunity to test my mettle in providing analysis to another party that wasn't myself, as I had done in my personal projects. As I mentioned in the overview, I had to consider what the organization really wanted out of an analysis, and ascertain how feasible it was to complete. It was really down to me to narrow down a project scope and deliverables based on what they wanted, since the stakeholders did not have a technical background. I also handled setting up our system of communication and progress upates. Since much of this was up to my discression, I felt a very strong drive to provide an excellent end-product, even moreso considering this was my first analytical output that would be serving a real-world purpose and for a great cause at that. I was extremely pleased when I presented my findings to the stakeholders and was met with resounding satisfactioon with what I'd shown. Now, I'm much more confident in completing an end-to-end data analysis and creating meaningful deliverables, and trust my work ethic even more.