The Getting to Know U team is looking to enroll students for course credit in the Spring 2026 semester. Paid opportunities may be available on a case-by-case basis.
The first goal of Getting to Know U is to curate the large volumes of data collected by higher education institutions. The team will then develop dashboards and other tools that enable users and decision-makers to analyze, understand, and act on that data.
Universities already collect large amounts of data from students (e.g. application data, background, GPA), faculty and staff (e.g. demographics, employment, awards), infrastructure (e.g. square footage, physical plant, power usage), finance entities (e.g. budgets, pay), research operations (e.g. awards, expenditures, patents), and the registrar (e.g. courses, programs, degrees). Such data is, however, siloed and not available as needed in a usable way for envisioning the status of the university. The issues involved in attempting to extract information from the data range from the regulatory and compliance (e.g. FERPA) to accuracy and consistency. The project will focus on building tools that progress from descriptive analytics (dashboard of historical data), to predictive analytics (predict future trends), and ultimately to prescriptive analytics (perform what-if analyses).
Note: An identical VIP is being created at Georgia Tech, and our plans are to collaborate with that group (see https://www.vip.gatech.edu/teams/VXG).
For more information about this team, please visit: https://uavip.arizona.edu/getting-know-u
