Skill Set

Critical Thinking

Quantitative Methods

Critical thinking skills include the ability to interpret, analyze, and evaluate complex problems and these skills have been highlighted in my quantitative methods courses where I have worked on projects that analyze data to determine causal inferences. In my second quantitative methods course, I worked in a group of three to develop an empirical paper measuring education and job match, specifically looking at the impact on job-relatedness and wages. We used data from the 2011 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau for our analysis and we created a match variable by matching degree field to industry. Our team had to hand-match degree field to industry based on the research of which industries typically hired candidates from which degree fields. This took the majority of our project and displayed my critical thinking capabilities as some industries had multiple degree fields. For our analysis, we used multiple interaction and logarithmic regression functions to find the percent change in wage and ultimately our results did support our original hypothesis. Due to the creativity of this topic and having to create a detailed, lengthy new variable, I found myself running into issues. Many times, I had to take a step back and figure out new ways to approach the coding to provide the tables and charts we were anticipating. This experience taught me to be persistent with my work and take a step back to think creatively when I run into problems.

Organization

CalFit Manteca

A key characteristics that organized individuals have is their ability to develop systems to manage tasks, and my organizational and planning skills can be portrayed through a task I had at CalFit where I developed a mechanism to increase our collection efforts on defaulted accounts. I was given the responsibility to take over the debt collections for the overdue gym membership accounts and to find a 3^rd-party debt collector to take the accounts we could not recover. In the past, there was no system for overdue bills, and they had relied on the payment company’s three postal letters as their collection efforts. I saw this as an opportunity to make a systematic change and potentially increase our debt collection efforts, so I created a comprehensive dataset of each member 9 days and over past due for our employees to make phone calls and send emails for payment reminders. In the database, I created columns for the employees to mark the date, time, and form of contact they had with each member to keep track on our end. After three attempts of contact and for accounts 90 or more days past due, we sent the account to the debt collector. Having this organized mechanism in place proved useful multiple times when the debt collector would contact us about certain accounts, indicating members had said they already paid or canceled their accounts. We were able to backtrack and list the exact dates, times, and types of notices we sent and whether or not we had had contact with the member. This experience has led me to think more creatively for ways to improve efficiency in the workforce.

Numeracy

Capital Improvement Plan

Creating the excel sheet for the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) project in my budgeting course tested and strengthen my numeracy skills. I applied concepts I learned in quantitative methods, public finance, macro and microeconomics, and public budgeting to create a 5-year plan for a hypothetical city. For this, I had to take into account the property tax, sales tax, and other revenue to create an annual revenue forecast. From there I took into account both expenditures, including operating expenditures, debt service payments and direct transfers, and savings, including creating an economic stabilization fund and sinking fund. Then I determined which projects our city wanted to finance, and this included figuring out debt service options and finding the profitability of each project in the long run. After calculating each of these figures I then made a list of the most beneficial projects that appealed to the city’s goals and included them in a 5-year budget document, balancing the budget for each fiscal year. At first, this was difficult for me to understand and I spent a great amount of time referring back to my notes and notes from previous semesters, but I felt great satisfaction once I completed the document. This is the exact type of project and work I would expect to do if I work in a local finance department after graduation, so being able to get practical experience is beneficial for me in the long run.

Communication

Graduate Assistant of Research

My verbal, written, and visual communication skills have strengthened significantly over the past year in my role as a graduate assistant of research (GAR). Working for Dr. Kalena Cortes has provided me with several opportunities to improve my verbal communication skills in multiple capacities. Our weekly in-person meetings and occasional phone calls have allowed me to develop a close relationship with her, where I feel comfortable communicating my questions and comments on my assignments. Additionally, I am working with her research team on a current study, where I participate in the weekly video conferences with various professionals in the field. Dr. Cortes and I frequently communicate via email, however, my written skills have also progressed with my ongoing project of requesting data from various universities across the state. This task has required that I contact multiple people from each university in a professional and informative manner, to obtain the data needed for the study. Working for Dr. Cortes has also provided me with avenues to strengthen my visual communication in learning how to create word clouds and research posters, both aimed at different types of audiences. This experience as a GAR has led me to build upon all types of communication skills, but most importantly it has taught me how to communicate more effectively with different audiences.

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