Nisky Student Collects Data on US Postal Service

by Catie Lasek

This past August, rising Niskayuna High School freshman Ahiri Garde was curious about the United States Postal Service. She had read many news articles concerning the slow down in the United States postal system due to mail-in ballots for the national election, and she wanted to see the impact of this for herself. Garde decided to use her free time to conduct an experiment where she sent weekly letters to eight of her and her parents’ friends in Georgia, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Texas, and even out of the country to the United Kingdom.

To collect her data, Garde would first keep track of the day that she sent her letter out, and all of her friends would send a picture of the letter the day that they received it in the mail. Garde would then enter her results into Excel to keep track of and analyze the data she collected. Most of the time, these letters took from three to five days to be delivered everywhere, even out of the country. However sometime in October the letters she sent to her friend in Georgia slowed down to being delivered in around eight to ten days, which Garde suspected was caused by the overflow of Georgia mail-in ballots for the national election. During the time period in which the experiment took place, only a few of her letters were damaged or lost in the mail, which made her data accurate.

The most difficult part for her was said to be coming up with content for Garde to send, because there were so many letters that had to be sent for the sake of the experiment. If her friends were sending letters back to her she would respond to those, however not all of her friends were writing letters back. If that were the case, Garde would have to get creative with her letters. She would send anything to them from riddles or logic puzzles to math problems, fun little things that she thought her friends would enjoy. Sometimes she even correlated the letter she wrote to the stamp she put on the envelope. If there was an artist or some other famous figure on a stamp, she would research that person and write a detailed biography of the person for her friend to read. If she ran out of ideas, she would ask for help from her parents and local friends to see if they could pitch in any useful ideas or topics for content. In total, Garde sent out around three hundred sixty different letters to her friends around the world between the months of August and November. She only stopped working on this project fairly recently, in early to mid November after all of the mail-in ballots were collected.

Garde had never done an experiment to this scale before this one, and she had never even been to the Post Office prior to these past few months. Along with mastering the program Excel to enter and analyze her data, Garde learned a few useful skills such as the importance of consistency. Her experiment required her to be incredibly diligent about getting her letters out to the mailbox or buying new stamps from the local post office. Garde enjoyed conducting this experiment, and the overall results that she received were very informational. She intends to compare her data to other similar experiments to continue her analysis of the United States Postal Service.