The MISC Survey Committee

Gauging the overall student experience at the iSchool through student-run surveys and data collection

During my time pursuing a Master of Information at the University of Toronto, I served as Survey Committee Co-Chair on the Master of Information Student Council (MISC) from 2019-2021. Besides being an excellent way to understand the student body, this position gave me the opportunity to flex my survey design & analysis skills and experiment with effective information management and distribution.

Background

Prior to my year, the MISC Survey Committee was a working group tasked with managing the end-of-year student experience survey. In 2019, its responsibilities were expanded to include surveys for various committees, working groups, and initiatives.

Key Accomplishments

Anticipating the need to avoid confusion and spiderwebs of links, I established the MISC Survey Centre, a central site for ongoing surveys, published reports, and other survey-related items. It enjoyed decent popularity, counting over 500 unique visitors and 1,800 pageviews (with a little help from Google Analytics).

Together with my co-chairs, we administered and analyzed 16 surveys overall, including two major end-of-year satisfaction surveys. For the satisfaction survey reports, I provided the general report structure and coded qualitative responses with commentary, as well as cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing quantitative responses (in R).

Results

Along with gauging the student experience and functioning as a channel for direct student advocacy, the Survey Committee generated more positive publicity and student interactions with MISC (spending our budget on gift cards and raffle prizes definitely helped!).

Overall, I honed essential survey skills, learning about what differentiates good from great questions, how to elicit better responses, and figuring out the biases we trip into when looking at data. I spelunked into the depths of R and the Google ecosystem (from Drive to Forms to Sites to Analytics), and at the end of it all, found out how satisfying it is to serve the local community.