Our “Day in the Life” blog series, launched in early 2024, shines a spotlight on the people who make Education Analytics (EA) a great place to work. During the past year, we've had the privilege of featuring team members from numerous departments, including Analyst, Brand & Communications, Engineering, Finance & Accounting, Partner Strategy, Product & Development Operations, and Program Operations teams. This series celebrates their unique contributions and the meaningful work they do every day to drive our mission forward.
To wrap up 2024, we wanted to do a short recap of the year in “Day in the Life” blogs!
January 2024: Senior Data Engineer Tom Reitz
What is the most rewarding aspect of your role?
Even though my work is several steps removed from students and educators, I know that by providing them (and their support systems) with state-of-the-art data technology, we are enabling the delivery of quality education to millions of kids – an incredible transformative potential. I am grateful to have a small role in such impactful work.
February 2024: Senior Research Analyst Abhijeet Ball
What changes do you anticipate in your field in the next year?
We are seeing a lot of interest from partners in building out interoperable data systems using Ed-Fi. This should give the analyst team access to more timely and better-quality data and should enable us to build out analytics solutions that help teachers and administrators make day-to-day decisions. We already have a few implementations of such products, including Podium and the Rally Analytics Platform. I think we will continue to grow these products’ capabilities and expand coverage to more partners in the next few years. I expect EA to continue to develop more products that have more proactive use cases in contrast to the reactive use cases that some of our legacy projects addressed.
I am also interested in seeing how coding assist tools such as GitHub Copilot might be integrated within our workflows if EA starts to adopt this across different teams. A lot of the code that is written on the analyst team can be quite bespoke depending on policy and the broader context of the external partner data sets. I am interested in seeing how a generative AI tool might perform in this context.
March 2024: Vice President of Product Regan Vanden Boogard
What skills do you possess that you find helpful in your role?
I enjoy learning and expanding my understanding of the world. It has driven me to pursue a second master’s degree and seek out expertise-based professional communities, workshops and conferences. Through my experiences, I’ve refined my leadership, group facilitation and strategic planning skills, but most of all, being curious and staying humble is best when collaborating with others on projects big and small.
April 2024: Accountant II Kiki Moritsugu
What interested you in working at EA?
My previous job in this type of work was as the one-person accounting team for a toy store here in Madison, called Capitol Kids. When I was brought on to work at EA, I found myself working as part of a team and working on non-profit accounting work, which is very different from retail! EA has afforded me the chance to grow my skill set and knowledge about this kind of work. I have been at EA for 5 years and now, I’m a certified non-profit accounting professional. EA’s emphasis on growth for its employees is what made this certification opportunity possible. I am also a professional actor, singer, and dancer, and working at EA has given me the flexibility to grow as an accountant and as a performer.
May 2024: Technical Delivery Lead Shane Jay Fairbairn
What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on at EA?
I love working with our Podium product. So much must happen in the background for one image or graph to represent data in a way that is both meaningful and actionable for educators. Since Podium is operational in different states and contexts, when we create a solution to help a partner in one context, it transfers because of how data standards and technology support sharing. Also, it is fun talking about how to make something impactful from different perspectives, e.g., aesthetics, analytics, and security.
June 2024: Program Operations Manager Kale Mabin
How would you describe your role on the Program Operations team?
Program Operations builds and supports both project management and organizational strategy tools and processes to support our program teams’ efficiency and quality of project delivery. As a Program Operations Manager, I focus on creating tools, processes, and best practices guidance. My work often involves developing and piloting tools and processes that could be used across projects, supporting usability testing and implementation, consulting with our internal operations teams on the work they support that interacts with program teams, and gathering ideas from program teams for innovation and improvements.
July 2024: Cloud Engineer III Megan Nash
What is the most rewarding aspect of your role?
What I find most rewarding is helping to enable the downstream uses of Ed-Fi data. I enjoy seeing the tools that rely on data from the Ed-Fi ODS and how those tools are used to help improve student outcomes.
September 2024: Research Analyst I Carly Benson
If you had to choose a different team to work on at EA, which team would you pick and why?
Probably Partner Strategy! Learning about the unique contexts and policy considerations that our partners work within is really interesting, so being on the PS team and interacting with a variety of external partners would be fun for me. I am also always in awe of the PS team’s organizational skills.
November 2024: Marketing Coordinator Grayce Payne
What is something that you would tell your younger self about your career?
I would tell my younger self that it’s okay not to know everything and that you will develop certain skills through time, patience, and practice. I think I wanted to know everything because I was nervous to admit when I wasn’t familiar with a certain skill or subject matter. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a lot more comfortable asking for help when I need it and asking for clarification or an explanation when I don’t know or understand something. I would much rather ask for help from my talented and knowledgeable team members as opposed to struggling in silence with certain subject matter or with a certain project. Nowadays, I see asking for help and admitting when you don't know something as quite courageous!