Nearing the End

Week 8?!?! Already? How is this even real? Why? So little time! Merp.

In all seriousness though (sort of...kind of...eh, not really), how did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

For those of you unfamiliar with the LEGEND that is Dr. Seuss (for shame), he's the one who said that. Isn't he great? But really! I can't believe we're at Week 8 and I'll really have to face saying goodbye to my dearest internship and all you lovely people in only a couple of weeks!

But for now, I'll just tell you what I did this week.

I got to help another Chamber intern from ASU with a pretty big project this week. One of the employees at the Chamber works extensively with education and she asked us on Tuesday to gather information supporting Arizona's education system and with relevant statistics and ranking information. Every year, she releases a sort of flyer to businesses looking to move to Arizona or recruitment offices for businesses looking for a place to relocate or start up. For those new businesses, one big aspect factoring into where they will situate themselves is making sure they satisfy the needs of most of their employees. This includes a good place for their employees' children to go to school and generally be educated. So, this week, we worked on marketing Arizona so that it looks particularly appealing to these businesses looking to move here because one of the goals of the Chamber is to attract good business into the state.

My job was to mostly gather headlines about Arizona education that we could put on the flyer. For instance, I found a bunch of headlines like "Arizona high school graduation rate improvement among best in nation" or "AZ Ranks in Top Five Nationwide for Charter Schools" (GO BASIS!) or "AZ WEEK: Excellence in Classroom Amid Challenges." Besides that, I looked for statistics that backed up the headlines and all the research as well. For instance (and most of these are 2015 statistics since the 2016 ones aren't out yet), Arizona had 77.4% of its public high school students graduating on time, with Santa Cruz County having the highest graduation rate at 88.4% in the state. Moreover, Arizona has seen a lot of improvement, a trend the rest of the nation mirrors as well. The high school graduation rate for Arizona rose from 75.1% in 2013 to 77.4% in 2015 alone. So yay!

Source: mapazdashboard.arizona.edu

Besides high schools, I looked at the Maricopa County community colleges for good information too. For the MCC, I found headlines such as "SIX MARICOPA COMMUNITY COLLEGES NAMED AMONG TOP IN THE NATION" and "Community colleges see rise in 6-year graduation rate." In terms of statistics I found, MCC saw a 37% increase in student transfers from the community colleges to Arizona public universities. This demonstrated a trend of improvement, success, and advancement in higher education at Arizona's community colleges.

Besides all the fun research work I did this week, I also got to act like an adult (for once)! Ignore the stuff in the parentheses. That's just my brain being mean to me. Another awesome Chamber person asked me to call the DC congressional offices of ten different members of Congress to ask them the names of their environmental issues legislative assistants. I was way more excited than I should have been about this as I eagerly called each of them and proudly said "HI! (Imagine a hyper-excited, possibly screechy voice) this is Shreya calling from the Arizona Chamber of Commerce" and I am doing important adult things! It was really great.

Ahem. Moving on.

I haven't gotten feedback on my surveys from my faculty adviser yet, but once that happens, my surveys will be getting out to their target audiences! Much fun! When I made the surveys, I really concentrated on making sure I sounded as objective as possible in wording the questions and the stories I will present to the participants so I don't influence their responses in any way. I also did my best to find stories on varied topics that have a mix of both negatively and positively viewed work that lobbyists have done so that I can really see what people think of lobbying from a truly objective perspective. Hopefully, I can find some interesting information to share with you guys. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there isn't a lot of research about societal perceptions surrounding lobbying (other than that they're pretty bad), so the surveys I'm conducting will be one of the first original pieces of research in that area. Yay student contributions!

Thank you again for staying with me until this point and reading all my posts! I will see you guys again next week! Have an awesome, fun-filled weekend! And don't hurt yourself (fall) walking down the stairs. Seriously. You don't want that to happen. It's not pretty.