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Welcome to the Bren Student Data Explorer Wiki!

Here, you will find important documentation and detailed instructions for updating and maintaining the Bren Student Data Explorer. We recommend reviewing materials in the following order:

  1. Read through the contents of this home page for some brief, initial context and learning about important contacts
  2. Review the Data set descriptions & definitions
  3. Review / work your way through the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and reference the Dashboard data viz & statistics descriptions (which describes all dashboard elements, data frames / variables used to construct them, etc), as needed.

What is the Bren Student Data Explorer?

The Bren Student Data Explorer is an interactive web application built to visualize admissions and career outcome data of current students and recent graduates. It includes demographics of all Bren students and career outcomes for master’s students (MEDS & MESM). We developed this explorer with the intention of supporting:

  • Prospective students in their decision-making as they explore different Bren School degree programs
  • Bren staff across all units to offer relevant information for strategic planning and reporting requirements
  • All Bren communities and stakeholders from past, present, and future by creating data transparency and data integrity through an accessible application

The visualizations and statistics presented are generated using data from the following sources:

  • Bren Career Team (three most recent years)
  • Bren admissions data from UCSB Graduate Division (five most recent years)

Data update schedule

Updates to the Bren Student Data Explorer have historically (2022 - 2024) occurred at slightly different times throughout the year, largely because career placement and admissions data are available at different times. Ideally, we keep a consistent update schedule. Beginning Spring 2025, I (Sam) and proposing that we make updates on the following timeline:

Time period Tasks
April / May Add updated career placement data for the prior year (e.g. we add career placement data for the Class of 2024 in Spring 2025) & add admissions data for the upcoming year (e.g. we add admissions data for the incoming Class of 2025 in Spring 2025)
October / November Update admissions data based on last-minute changes to admits (i.e. it is not unusual to have some amount of "melt" e.g. admits who SIRed "Yes" but ultimately don't show up for the start of the program, decide to leave during the the first few weeks of the program, defer until the following year, etc.). We want to account for these students so that the dashboard data reflects our programs' number of enrolled students as accurately as possible.

Who built it, and who's responsible for it now?

This dashboard was originally developed by MEDS 2022 Alum & Bren R Shiny Developer Fellow, Halina Do-Linh. The following staff have played important roles in advising and supporting the continued development of the dashboard:

Past contributors: