Awards

This team has created an open data dashboard that will aid actors across the federal government in identifying hiring trends and outcomes. Such stakeholders include the US Office of Personnel Management, the US General Services Administration's Office of Evaluation Sciences, researchers in the fields of political science, public management, and labor economics, career counselors at higher education institutions, and good government organizations across the United States. Such a tool did not exist until these students put their minds and efforts to this enterprise, and it will pay off in so many ways to so many stakeholders dedicated to ensuring the best and brightest have access to careers in federal service. 

This team has been, from top to bottom and left to right, an extraordinary collaborative experience, whose product (an analytical dashboard that provides longitudinal analysis on the federal civil service labor market) will inform policymakers, employers, educators, and researchers for years to come. The work is already a key dimension of the Sol Price School's Civic Leadership Education and Research (CLEAR) Initiative and its continued development will be funded by the Volcker Alliance --- a national nonprofit organization dedicated to good government. Each student contributed consistently, with great vigor, and with exceptional rigor throughout. I will do anything I can within my power to assure that this group of exceptional humans is able to meet their potential as they deserve every success in life if they pursue things as they did in this project. 

Yi has led the team throughout the entire process. He has been the most agile and flexible in his skill set (though all of the students were great)! His ability to quickly and wholly absorb domain specificity and apply his broad data science skills to that domain made this project a great success. Not only will this project have direct policy impacts, but the Volcker Alliance has preliminarily approved funding for this project to be extended, which Yi will subsequently lead. I cannot more emphatically endorse this individual for this award, and to further this point, I am recommending him for several Ph.D. programs in Public Policy, including ours at the Sol Price School of Public Policy. Those schools are by their very nature interdisciplinary in their orientation (data science, public policy, political science, public administration, management, etc), and he will one day be a superstar!