Monday

On Monday, your week begins with reviewing the projects you’ve been assigned for the week and checking in with your project director. Your project director sends you some data sets that a client sent over the weekend and asks you to provide a summary. Today you will just be cleaning, processing, and summarizing the data for your project director. This requires a keen eye for detail, a logical thought process for discerning errors, and a general understanding of what data are important for an initial overview to help your project director know what data they have to work with and whether they will need to make further data requests or adjust their analysis.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, they may ask you to create a single analysis file out of the client data and select a sample for a survey that you or your colleagues have developed. After you’ve selected a sample, you will coordinate outreach via mail, email, and phone with other members of the team and ensure that the web survey is operational.

Wednesday

On Wednesday, with your previous project handed off to other team members, you switch gears to prepare for a webinar where you will provide training to program administrators on how to use a new web tool provided by the federal government. This requires you to create an engaging presentation with examples that are relevant to attendees, and clear and concise explanations of the web tools’ capabilities. You will meet with other team members prior to the webinar for a dry run and make any necessary last-minute adjustments before the presentation. During the meeting, however, you may have to quickly switch over to a live demonstration of the tool in order to answer questions from the audience.

Thursday

After a successful presentation, you spend Thursday morning conducting an in-depth interview for another project evaluating a state government program. This requires understanding key topics to guide the conversation toward, comfortability diverging from the questions on the instrument, and identifying relevant follow-up questions. After your interview, you will spend the rest of the day writing a summary of the interview, reaching out and scheduling with other interview contacts, and preparing a disposition report for your project director.

Friday

On Friday you have a training scheduled. While you will pick up many skills on the job, organized courses are equally vital to your professional development as a Policy Analyst. With wide latitude to choose your training based on your own interests and needs, you can attend trainings ranging from best practices in survey development to new statistical analysis methods to conferences presenting on new research in the field. Today you will be attending a training session to improve your skills with Stata, integrating your pre-existing knowledge of statistical sampling and analysis with the software to write original programs more quickly and efficiently. In the afternoon, you will compile tables and provide draft findings for a completed evaluation. You may be asked to create tables with minimal guidance on what variables should be included. This requires an understanding of what indicators are being evaluated in the program and what characteristics of a participant might affect their success. You will also be reviewing and editing other sections of the report for grammatical and formatting issues. With your work completed, you wrap up any loose ends and prepare for another exciting week as a Policy Analyst!