Students learn to communicate data in a way that demonstrates its relevance and catches the eye.
May 02, 2018
Jeannine Adams

 

As part of the Harris Mentor program, 35 students interested in data analytics recently attended a Data Visualization Workshop at Google’s offices in downtown Chicago. The interactive session offered strategies to help students create and powerfully present data visualizations, an ability that can make the difference between whether a brilliant policy recommendation sits on a shelf gathering dust or persuades policymakers of its urgency and importance.

Kevin Hartman MBA'98/MPP'98, a longtime Harris mentor and Head of Analytics for the Consumer, Government & Entertainment sectors at Google, hosted the workshop, which highlighted the theory of presentation and taught hands-on skills to foster more effective visual communications.    

Students formed teams in order to tackle data visualization challenges and then presented their work and findings to other workshop participants in an effort to clearly articulate key data insights and takeaways.  

"Great visualizations require skill, preparedness, and a willingness to work within the rubric of presentation best practices."

Students also spent time learning practical skills including fonts to use, how to make an effective pie chart, how to deploy colors, and how to structure the content of a presentation, among others.

“Being good at data visualization is not about making nice looking graphs or charts,” says Hartman.  “It’s about demonstrating clearly to your audience the insights they should earn from the data. It just happens that the best demonstrations are great visualizations, and great visualizations require skill, preparedness, and a willingness to work within the rubric of presentation best practices.”

“The Data Visualization workshop made me rethink how I am presenting my material,” says Sarah Boyle, a student and workshop attendee. “Regression tables are interesting if you know how to read them, but in order to be an effective policy maker, conveying information in a clear and concise way to all audiences is essential. Kevin presented key lessons that will help all of us present our information more effectively as policy makers.”

Students present their data at the Data Visualization Workshop at Google.

The Workshop was scheduled as part of the school’s award-winning Harris Mentor Program, which offers a unique set of experiences to students, including quarterly events from which they can practically apply their policy education. The program fosters meaningful connections between students and mentors and helps students build a powerful professional network for the future.

Andrew Dawson, assistant director of student affairs at Harris and one of the leaders of the Mentorship program, believes the workshop focused on one of the more essential skills for aspiring policy practitioners. “Public policy often sits at the confluence of good data solutions and the practice of politics,” Dawson says. “Effectively conveying insights and supportive data is not only important to becoming a policy leader, it’s becoming more important in this increasingly digital world, where visualizations can travel across the globe in a matter of seconds.”