The new semester is going to have me pretty busy

Between my grad assistantship work for 2 different profs, my duties as MSIS rep for the Graduate Business Association, and my classes, I'll be pretty darned busy until May.  My courses are:

Information Systems Analysis and Design
Cyber Security Tech Factors
Java Development
Text Analytics

I'm most interested in the text analytics class, since I'll finally get hands on experience with SPSS, and the whole topic is a favorite of mine.  Should be a fun few months.

Finally have the time to look for a new home

As I mentioned in Not my permanent home I wanted to look around a bit before committing to a CMS.  I tend to see blogger as a great place to throw things together in a fast and temporary way, but if I want to make this blog into something really great, I want to move it to my own server. 

Here's the thing, though--I'm a perfectionist.  And a nerd.  Combined, it's a lethal combination.

So tonight I got sidetracked (which, btw, reminds me of Kevin Macdonell's excellent blog post "There's no such thing as wasted time"), and instead of putting together something for my research summary on the donor management tool we've been working on, I found myself pouring through a report from Idealware called Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Plone.

Yeah, I'm a real party animal in the off season.

Anyway, it seems as though I'll read a bit about WordPress and be sold on it...then I get swayed to Joomla, and then Drupal starts looking good.  I can feel this tingling sensation of perfectionism kicking in, and I know from experience that I could lose hours or days just combing through reviews, and available add-ins, and...well...overthinking things.

My solution to this is that I've saved the Idealware report, I'll download WordPress first, and test drive a set up.  I'll ask a couple people I know if they're happy with what they use.  But for tonight, I'm tossing this all up here on my blogger account and saving it as evidence of the journey.  It'll all still be right here when I want it, and it'll wait.

And the internship search commences....NOW

With my last final out of the way, it's time to seriously search for a summer internship.  I have a few applications out, but during this holiday break I need to sit down and find more leads.  Ideally, I'd like to find something in the Seattle area, since that's where I plan to settle after my graduation in December 2010.  On a preliminary search, I found a place I'd really like to contact and set something up: NPower Seattle.  I don't know how much (if any) analytics they offer for nonprofits, but I'd also be interested in their CRM project.  I've also applied for a Microsoft internship, since they're pushing a good amount of data mining (especially text mining) with their Bing projects.  However, MS internships are extremely hard to land (seeing as though they apparently compensate their interns quite well).  If I can't find something in Seattle, I'll have to look in the Waco-Austin area.

I believe that if I end up interning in the business analytics field, I can still use that to the benefit of nonprofits.  I just see too many similarities between private sector and nonprofits to say "oh no, I must find an internship in a nonprofit."

I wonder what the updated assumption is nowadays for internship compensation.  Back when I was an undergrad, everyone I spoke to had pretty lucrative internships, and it seemed as though full-time positions were pretty much implied in the package.  I doubt that's the case anymore, since the economy today is vastly different from 1999.  If I have to, I might be able to swing an unpaid internship by taking out the max student loan amount, and if it's a situation where I think the experience is worth it, I'd try to make it work.  Technically, I don't even need an internship for my degree because I'm told that my work experience more than fulfills that requirement...but like I've said before, I'm not doing this for another degree to hang on the wall.  I'm doing it to broaden my knowledge, to get my foot in the door, and to be put in contact with people that know more than me and are willing to mentor an eager person with a unique background.

Helping smaller nonprofits afford the IT help they need

Well, yet another round of papers is done and out of the way.  I did a rather lackluster blurb about Gogo In-flight WiFi Service which, although it wasn't my best work, might come in handy for someone traveling this holiday season (especially if you're flying on American Airlines). 

The paper I enjoyed the most though, was Fundraising Analytics: What Nonprofit Organizations Can Learn from the Private Sector (yeah, I know, sounds thrilling).  This is the one that I'm hoping to refine and turn into something more substantial, and see if I can get it published.  Anyway, my basic premise is that nonprofits are behind the curve on using data mining to it's fullest extent, and text mining might be the next big thing.  I can picture taking all those reactive research reports and dumping them into a data warehouse, and just culling through it all (along with collected news articles and contact reports) for connections.

I'm putting together a quick and dirty powerpoint for my database prof to share some ideas I have about what can do in the future to improve the product we have, and make it more analytic-ready.  Mainly, I'm going to focus on what smaller nonprofits can do to mine the information they already have, without access to the tools that larger organizations have.  For instance, we've been using Tableau to aid visualization, but considering it's limitations, I was shocked when I checked into buying the full version.

(my reaction to their insane pricing)

So, my goal during this break is to look into what options a smaller nonprofit might have to reap the benefits.  I know there are macros for excel already out there that will do regression models, so if I find ones that are free I might start throwing that together with some other basic things (I know the newest version of excel  has a few rudimentary visualization tools for data mining so I'll see if that does what I'm envisioning), and if need be, making my own free tool.  It'll be a far cry from a CRM, but it'll be something.  It needs to be easy enough so that any person without a background in this stuff can just toss in the data, click a button, and get ready-to-use findings back, with possibly some charts to help sell the idea to the management-types.  I'll also check out the offerings already out there for open source things, and see what can be done.  

I have an uncle that runs a battered women's shelter in a fairly rural place.  He needs a quick and easy way to browse grants, to organize contacts, and to find interested donors.  He shouldn't have to spend lots of money to get this done; their funds are better spent on their primary mission.  Uh oh, I'm sensing some scope creep...but honestly, this is the stuff that I'm passionate about, and I'll do what it takes.   

Text analytics course

According to a press release Baylor University recently put out, the text analytics course I've enrolled in for the Spring semester is "the first of its kind in the United States and possibly the world. According to the class' instructor, Dr. Theresa Edgington, "Current market trends indicate Business Analytics (which include traditional business intelligence, data mining, and text analytics) is the growth field for Information Systems (IS)."  Other classes of its kind have apparently been taught in engineering departments, but not in a business school environment.

Another interesting tidbit from the article:

"Edgington also noted an interesting trend among the early registrants for her course: so far they are all women. While she emphasized men are more than welcome, she is excited about the surprising demographics. Much has been made concerning the lack of women in IS. But this new class could represent an opportunity for Baylor to promote positive change by enticing more women to the field."

As of today, I see via the registration website that there are 3 people signed up for the class (myself included).  Unlike the data mining class (that was also first offered this year), text analytics is only open to graduate students or undergrads with special permission.  I'm excited that this course is being offered just in time for me to take advantage of it, since otherwise I would have formed an independant study for this topic anyway.  At least this way, I'll have at least 2 other people to bounce ideas off of.

Wolfram Alpha and statistics

I just heard about Wolfram Alpha's scary computational abilities from Lifehacker, and had to check it out myself.  I did a quickie search to see what it could do in terms of statistics, and it turned up some things that I'll have to give further attention to.  I'm betting it could do all the typical finance equations as well.

I want to thank the Academy...

A friend of mine, David Stein, recently wrote a tribute to his favorite high school teacher.  I was fortunate enough to have a good amount of teachers that taught the fundamentals, but the ones that I still remember are the ones whose enthusiasm just bubbled out of them.  People that are passionate about what they do have helped push me to follow my own passions, and I'm so glad to have come across them.  So, thanks to Dave's reminder, I'd like to thank the following people:

Mrs. Pfiefer, who in the 6th grade once wrote on a progress report, "I fully expect to see Jennifer's name on a book jacket someday"

Pamela Stanescu, who taught my AP US History class back at Warner Robins High School.  Once, during a school bomb threat that evacuated all the buildings to a nearby parking lot, she actually gathered our class around her and kept teaching.  Other classes were milling around just killing time, but there we were, listening to her every word because she knew how to make it come alive.  I still remember "the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ration of 16:1."

Rachel Moore, who was technically an english professor at Baylor, but taught much more than that.  

David Sturgill, my favorite computer science prof at Baylor during my undergrad years when I had him for an OS class.  He knew his stuff, and (unlike a lot of profs) could effectively teach it too.

Gina Green, who has taken me under her wing as we collaborate on everything from grant writing to a custom CRM for nonprofits.

Betsy Willis, who threw me into the deep end of accounting this past summer, but whose teacher style got me back into the swing of things after 10 years away from the classroom.

I've recently been elected to serve as the MSIS rep for the Graduate Business Association (which is easy to accomplish when you're unopposed :)  ), and if I had to give a tearful acceptance speech (minus an interruption from Kanye West), it'd have been a lot like this.