Anteater Insider podcast: supporting student progress through analytics

In this episode of the Anteater Insider podcast, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Patty Morales and fourth-year Education Sciences student Ella Lee discuss the barriers UCI students face along the way to graduation and how the university is working to address those barriers through analytics and data partnerships to support student progress.

This episode was recorded in the podcast studio in the ANTrepreneur Center. To get these podcasts delivered automatically, subscribe at:

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TRANSCRIPT

David Naimie 

From the University of California, Irvine, I’m David Naimie and you’re listening to the Anteater Insider Podcast. Today, I’m talking with Vice Provost of Enrollment Management, Patty Morales, and fourth year Education Sciences major, Ella Lee. Together, we’ll talk about barriers students face along their academic journey and how Enrollment Management is working to address those challenges to support students progress and success at UCI.

Patty, Ella, thanks for joining me.

Ella Lee

Thank you. Yeah.

Patty Morales

Thanks for having us.

David Naimie 

Excellent. Ella, I want to hear about your time at UCI. How did you come to apply here and what were you planning to study?

Ella Lee

My dad was an Anteater. He graduated in ‘87. So UCI was always on my radar. I applied to 11 different schools and colleges and UCI was always at the top there. And when I was applying, I applied as a pharmaceutical sciences major. My alternate major was Chemical Engineering. I did get waitlisted, but I got off the waitlist a few days before my birthday. Great birthday present! Yeah, and I was in for Chemical Engineering, which was my second choice major. So, I went into my first year of college in 2020, the height of COVID. It was challenging, but it was fun. I made a lot of good memories, good friends, it was a lot of fun. And I had the opportunity to dorm in Middle Earth, one of the on-campus housing communities here. I had a triple to myself. So, three times the beds, dressers, desks – I had a whole dresser for food – it was great. And, then, going into my second year, when we started to get more in-person stuff, I finally had my first in-person class, which was kind of daunting, but very exciting …that’s kind of where like things took a turn, just in the fact of I had to figure out how to manage my time better …and how to deal with all these different organizations and clubs in school because you’re a student first at UCI. All of these things and what to prioritize first, which is kind of where I ended up switching my major. And there were a bunch of different resources, which I’m sure we’ll get into later. That helped me out a lot in that process as well.

David Naimie 

So, you mentioned your dad …I just think that’s really interesting – he was an Anteater …and I’m kind of wondering how he feels about all of your transitions, all of the involvements you’ve been into, and now this transition into the new major. Has that been a challenge – the coming to UCI and choosing this path that you’re on – has this created any kind of a challenge for you and your father or your family as a whole?

Ella Lee

I think the main challenge for myself is that I’m very close to my family. I feel very fortunate to say that because I know some students can’t say the same about their families. However, being 2000 miles away from home can be challenging at times. But I do have a really good support system being involved on campus and having these on campus jobs, which don’t really feel like jobs – they just feel like you’re hanging out with friends. It’s a lot of fun. Yeah, but those friends turned into family at UCI, which I think is really awesome in that way. Yeah, but my dad’s proud of me – good stuff. It’s always been good that way. But, as for more of my academic journey, he was very supportive. I think my mom had a little bit of a rocky start trying to get on the path of being okay with me changing majors outside of STEM. But now she’s super supportive. It didn’t take that long to get on that train. Yeah, it’s been good from here.

David Naimie 

So, challenges beyond the family … what other challenges have you, as a student, faced at UCI? I’ll pick one because we had a chance to talk about this before: the academic recovery process. Some people know that as academic probation. I was a counselor once. I worked with a lot of students who were on probation and I meant it to be a positive experience and a hopeful experience and productive. How was it for you to go through the academic recovery process?

Ella Lee

Right. Um, when I first got it, I just saw academic probation – that kind of big red letters type of thing – and probation, obviously, has a very negative connotation, in itself, which can be very scary for students, especially for me. In high school I never failed the class like I failed my Chemical Engineering class – didn’t do too well – and OChem, when I was starting out my very first in-person classes. But, I think, overall, the academic recovery process was very helpful in the fact that I got to talk to my academic counselor. I believe her name was Maggie. She’s cool. I loved her. And just being able to select certain resources …it was like a choose-your-own-adventure-type of thing. It was kind of fun. So, I chose speaking to academic tutors, specifically for the sciences –  chemistry and math and physics, especially chemistry. And, then, also being able to talk to the Division of Career Pathways – taking a test there. And, then, also talking to the Counseling Center, which was something that I found very beneficial as well.

David Naimie

And now you’re an Education Sciences major. So, tell us a little bit about that. How is that a good fit for you today?

Ella Lee

I love it. It’s so much fun. My best friend kind of persuaded me into doing it. But I wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s a fairly new school and major. I think we just celebrated our 10th year. But that means it’s ever-growing, ever-changing, which I think is awesome. And there are so many things you can learn about in Education Sciences, which before I thought it was just for becoming a teacher or just becoming a counselor, but, for me, I want to become a screenwriter for an educational children’s show, which a lot of people say is, wow, that’s really niche. Yeah, it is, but being able to take classes on child development is really interesting. They have a whole Child Development Series from, literally, conception to being a teen. And also I took this life-changing course, called Education 124. It’s a multicultural education class, and on my very first day of class the professor is introducing himself and he’s, like, “Hello, my name is Dr. Barry Goldenberg and call me Barry and I’ll be your professor”. He’s talking about himself.

David Naimie 

Oh, that’s a connection.

Ella Lee

Yeah, exactly. And it turned out, although years apart, we went to high school, 20 minutes away from each other. So, we’re from the same area. From there, it was like an instant connection. I started going to office hours, which professors have to have at UCI, and that was my very first office hours that I had with a professor and we were just talking about life, education, what I want to do outside of this – all that stuff as well. He ended up offering me a peer assistant position for his next Education 124 Class.

David Naimie 

Very nice. Wow. So, the involvements continue from friends to academics.

So, let me come over to Patty and talk a little about the barriers as well that students might face. Can you think of any hidden barriers that Ella or other students may not even be aware of, but we’re trying to address?

Patty Morales 

Sure, happy to. And I’ll just mention, for Enrollment Management, our goal is to consider the entire student lifecycle. The offices that are under enrollment management include Admissions, Financial Aid and Scholarships, the University Registrar, and we have an analytics unit. We have a tremendous responsibility there to ensure that we’re not only, you know, bringing a student into UCI and saying all the wonderful things that we have here, but then making sure that we’ve delivered on that promise that we’ve supported students all the way through so that they can have that successful experience and outcome. So, to go to the question about hidden barriers, majors have requirements, right? We also have general education requirements. There’s only certain days of the week, at certain times, if you have a work study job, that there’s a lot of logistics, and how a student has get through their academic and extracurricular life here. So there can be barriers that come up there if a student wants to make, for example, a transition and a major. And when they do that, they realize, well, I still have to take these requirements to fulfill this major, but I was doing this other thing. There’s a barrier right there. And how to navigate through that resolve that stay in timely progression. Maybe a student wants to go abroad – did that shut down their opportunity to go abroad? Well, we would never want that to happen. So, we’re trying, in the analytics unit, to provide the sort of reports or views or structures in the data about the course taking patterns, the requirements in a major to support, for example, advisors and faculty to help a student kind of anticipate what they might need to do or be creative in thinking about different ways to problem solve through that. Because we want to support those sorts of evolutions and changes and developments without foreclosing anything. Yeah, but unless you have that holistic big picture view, it becomes, you know, kind of a shot in the dark. And, later on, two or three quarters later, you find out that the course you need to take is not available that quarter. Well, that’s actually something that now we can get a view of and get ahead of and advise the student – “hey, be mindful, you’re going to need this course and it’s only offered every other year”. That’s just an example of a hidden barrier, because I think, sometimes, that’s not the most obvious thing that comes to mind.

David Naimie 

So, the holistic view combined with the power of data analytics has the ability to remove some of these friction points that students may not know that they could be facing. But if they never have to face them, we’ve done our job.

Patty Morales 

Exactly … friction is the right term. We want things to be as smooth as possible for, ideally, the student doesn’t know what’s going on in the background. Ideally, if it’s going well, they shouldn’t have to know. But, let’s be candid, we have systems here, we have processes that were set up, in some cases, decades ago and they serve a certain purpose, a logical purpose, that makes sense from an administrative perspective. But from that holistic student perspective, where lots of things are dependent on each other, and maybe something happens in Financial Aid or Registrar, and they’d get dropped from a course for whatever particular reason, and now they’re going to lose their aid. These things sort of have these relationships across these different administrative areas. If we expect the student to have to figure that out and get the kind of order of operations right –  well, that’s a lot of friction. Yeah, those are a lot of barriers. I see my job as making sure I’m collaborating with other campus leaders to identify where those points might be, you know, where I’m leading one unit, you have another leader across the another unit, we have processes that are separate to us, but to a student they have a relationship. So, can we figure that out –  take the students point of view and redesign it. So, that kind of responsibility we’re putting on the student to go from point A to point C to point D to point A …that they don’t have that experience. They can just focus on what’s going on for their lives.

David Naimie 

So, Patty, let me be more specific about the data that our office is actually working with. Can you describe some of that data? What is it that we have access to?

Patty Morales 

So, I’ll continue on the theme of courses just because it’s a pretty concrete one …we have the data related to all the courses that a student has taken and the grades they’ve achieved and when they’ve taken a course and what kind of prerequisites they already had coming in from AP or whatever the case might be. That’s data that when pieced together in a way that has a goal in mind, an objective in mind, which in this case is making sure you’ve satisfied all the things that you need to do to be able to get through that major, we’re able to better paint the picture for the student of how all of these different elements come together and see where there’s something missing. And if, instead, we’re just looking at it sort of piece by piece individually …sometimes it creeps up on you, you know …so that’s just an example of how we can use data in a creative way. That’s really about the individual student. I think a lot of times when we’re talking about data there’s this sense that comes into this very abstract thing and we’re talking about 1000s of records and data elements. But it’s actually the inverse. That’s the goal of this. It’s taking the data and remembering there’s a student underneath all that and has got this very multifaceted story. And our job as faculty and staff is to bring all of that information into meaningful focus and then use that to have those conversations with students, to partner with them to make the right decisions.

David Naimie 

And we’re part of a larger campus initiative, a student success initiative called Compass. What’s our role within that larger campus initiative?

Patty Morales 

I’ll go back to that theme of holistic views. Compass is an initiative that is bringing into collaboration the various offices across campus that service data for faculty and staff and other stakeholders. For example, the Office of Institutional Research. These might be offices that students may or may not be aware of that have the responsibility for doing all kinds of official reporting on behalf of the university, that’s critical for whether it’s funding agencies or government entities or making sure we’re tracking grant dollars and making sure faculty have access to what they need. Then, there’s offices within IT and Grad Division and the Office of the Vice Provost of Teaching and Learning/Undergraduate Education – we are all looking at data in a particular way. But, collaboratively, if we’re better aware of what each other is focusing on, then we’re able to, again, remind ourselves what’s the student’s perspective on all this? How do we bring these different data sources together or the way that we get at data? How do we develop better awareness between the different offices and units of what those things look like and identify where there’s opportunity to more seamlessly integrate those data sources or just redesign how we’ve structured them. So, the Compass initiative is fundamentally about collaboration and it’s fundamentally about bringing different perspectives on something into a cohesive view.

David Naimie 

Back to Ella because I know you have this long resume of things we heard about at the start and I actually took notes to go through them again …maybe you didn’t say this, but you’re working on a minor in Film and Media Studies, you’re a coordinator for campus reps with Admissions, you’re a captain of After League – I think that’s the sketch comedy group – and Chair of Events and Socials for DigiFilm Society. How do you manage those many opportunities …I think time management is part of it, right? What advice do you give other students, maybe your students in the residence halls, being involved in this way?

Ella Lee

Right. I think the biggest thing to remember that also I’m reminded of in the Resident Advisor position as well is that you’re a student first, and, of course, before that you’re a person. So, prioritize mental health care, self care, all that good stuff. Meditate, if you need to. Scroll on tiktok for a while if you need to. Yeah, but also I said earlier time management – maybe I have a paper due for one of my education classes and, then, also I have to do a film analysis for one of my film classes, but, then, also I have to plan an event for DigiFilm Society or I have to plan a program or host a program even for RA or maybe I have a tour for Campus Reps. And, all of these things, I have to figure out what is an immediate priority. And also how to react in certain cases of thinking about things more proactively than reactively.

David Naimie 

So, it’s almost like you are navigating your own barriers, hidden or otherwise, you have to address the many roles you have in the resident advisor role. You’ve said this to me – and I really liked this – you said that you’re one of the first people new students meet at UCI and that seems rewarding to you.

Ella Lee

Yes, it is extremely rewarding. I love it. I don’t even know how to put into words how much I love it so much. This is my third year being a Resident Advisor for Mesa Court and every single year is a little bit different in the fact of the batch of residents that I get and maybe some of their lived experiences, but the main overarching theme is that I am a big sister figure – I’m not a parent …I don’t manage them in that way. I am a shoulder to cry on. I’m a built-in best friend. I’m a plumber or electrician. I’m all of the things and just being able to be there for them is the most rewarding thing ever.

David Naimie 

Well, just as you seek to help new students in your role, does it mean a lot to know that UCI, and in this case Enrollment Management, is also trying to do what they do behind the scenes to help all students at UCI?

Ella Lee

Yeah, that’s very good to hear. I think the biggest thing is maybe some people will feel salty that these changes won’t be happening in their time at UCI. However, you got to take yourself out of that. Think about the prospective Anteaters that are coming in – the new students, the transfer students even – that are coming into this unknown world of UCI and just knowing that we’re ever-growing, ever-changing, evolving constantly. And if – like you were saying before, Patty – if you don’t know about these things going on behind the scenes, then maybe that’s a good thing. Yeah. Because otherwise, then, you just know about all the bad stuff. But yeah, just being able to see that or just hear from you that positive change is happening behind the scenes is very good to hear.

Patty Morales 

And when we hear about these challenges that’s actually contributing so much. I think that even if a student can’t, themselves, benefit from whatever change we put in place, hopefully, it’s comforting to know that we are listening and we are trying to make those improvements. Sometimes, they’re extremely hard to make for technology reasons and other things that just can seem, really, is it just about tech? But, sometimes, it is, frankly, so we are trying very hard to make those adjustments. And without the students sometimes pointing things out to us, it’ll be that much more difficult. So, hopefully, students take some comfort in knowing that they’re a big part of when we are able to make those improvements.

David Naimie 

I imagine you take some personal and professional satisfaction in knowing that your division is trying to help students.

Patty Morales 

Oh, absolutely. I’ll go back to what I opened with and that’s, much like Ella was describing, being one of the first people that a student meets when they start at UCI. My team is filling a similar role when we’re out talking to prospective students and their families and saying, this is such a wonderful place – you want to be here. We feel like we’re well positioned to have your dreams realized, etc. I feel a lot of responsibility in that. We’ve made that promise to students. We better deliver on it.

David Naimie 

I think universities, today, have to do their best to help their students succeed and graduate on time. So, it’s really nice to hear this effort is underway to try to do that here at UCI.

Ella, Patty, thank you for speaking with me today. I really appreciate it.

For more information, you can visit the Office of Enrollment Management website at enrollment.uci.edu. The Anteater Insider Podcast is a production of Strategic Communications and Public Affairs at the University of California, Irvine.

I’m David Naimie. Thank you for listening.