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, Business Strategy, Engineering, Implementation & Services, Information Technology (IT), Product, and Research teams. This series celebrates their unique contributions and the meaningful work they do every day to drive our mission forward.
To wrap up 2025, we wanted to do a short recap of the year in “Day in the Life” blogs!
January 2025 – IT Manager Mark Stokosa
What interested you in working at EA?
More than anything else, EA’s mission brought me on board here. I had been working as a Linux and Unix Systems Administrator for more than twenty years for several different companies. Something they all had in common for me was that I was so distant from what those companies did as a service or product for their customers that I never really became invested in the overall company's success beyond doing well for myself and for my immediate team. Here, EA’s mission is never far from my mind. I come from many teachers, administrators, and supporters of education in my extended family, and I have often reflected that, if I hadn’t chosen IT as a career, I would be in education.
March 2025 – Senior Business Development Coordinator Kate Marquez-Sweeney
What is the most rewarding aspect of your role?
One of the most rewarding aspects of my role is seeing an initial opportunity evolve into a formal project that directly supports education agencies. Watching something move through the pipeline—from an inquiry or proposal to an active partnership—is incredibly fulfilling. Our team plays a key role in keeping EA’s business growing, which in turn allows our talented engineers, researchers, and analysts to do what they do best: building impactful data solutions that help students and educators. Being part of that process and seeing our work come to life makes this role very meaningful.
April 2025 – Principal Researcher Michael Christian
What is your favorite project that you’ve worked on at EA?
They're all great, but the absolute best ones are the ones in which the partner is seriously engaged. It can be a lot of work to be deeply collaborative in that way but it is so great to see the outcome of that work. We're fortunate that all of our growth partners have really smart, motivated people working for them who share the goal of developing and using high-quality metrics.
June 2025 – Services Delivery Lead Ruth Brandvik
If you had to choose a different team to work on at EA, which team would you pick and why?
Probably Programs Operations. I love talking about processes and setting up systems and structures so that people are able to work more efficiently and easily. I have a fundamental drive to organize everything, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at my sock drawer.
July 2025 – Senior Software Engineer Bjorn Hauge
What skills do you possess that you find helpful in your role?
Creativity and flexibility are the most important skills for me. If you design the right system for the problem, the pieces come together easily. If you design it poorly, almost no amount of glue can hold them together. Design is a very creative and unstructured process.
Without a doubt, the most rewarding part of my role is the people I get to work with — both within my immediate team and the broader EA staff and leadership. I’ve never worked at an organization where so many people are not only incredibly capable and thoughtful, but also deeply mission-driven. It’s inspiring to collaborate with folks who care so much about doing meaningful work, and who bring both heart and rigor to everything they do. Being part of a community like that makes the work feel purposeful and energizing every day.
I started at EA as an intern while I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was an Economics major with an interest in technical work, but I was always motivated to do something with a positive mission. I really wasn’t sure what that role was or if it existed, and I was really excited to find it at EA! I have stayed all these years because EA continues to grow and evolve while providing me (and my colleagues) with the opportunity and support to grow and evolve alongside the organization. I started at EA as an entry-level Research Analyst and since then, I’ve received so many opportunities to learn and expand upon my professional and technical skills. During my time at EA, I’ve had the opportunity to grow in my analytical skills, become a people manager, guide the development of Business Intelligence (BI) work, and pivot to product management.
December 2025 – Senior Research Analyst Kayla Bollinger
What is the most rewarding aspect of your role?
I get the most reward out of taking a complex or time-consuming process and transforming it into something simple and fast. Usually, this work is me fighting entropy—a buildup of inefficiencies or gaps of understanding that alone seem negligible but together hinder a process from scaling. I enjoy the slowness of it. It often requires many iterations, gradually whittling a process down to its essentials. By the end, I’ve hopefully landed on a process that is intuitive and fast, prime for another analyst to continue building on top of it.
