Insider Interviews with META Lab GAs

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Interview with Grant Tuioti IPD ‘20 

By Salome Pachkoria, Anna Phillips and Jasmine Wang

Grant Tuioti is a student in the International Policy and Development program, graduating this semester. This is his third semester working at the META lab, and he is currently working as one of the managers. 

Grant already had certain data analysis skills by the time he completed his undergraduate degree, but the META Lab helped him refine those skills and gear them towards a specific direction. For him, the META Lab was less about learning a new skill and more about building his confidence and trying things out. 

In our interview, he talked about how his META Lab experience helped him with his practicum project: building a data analysis dashboard for the Monterey Police Department. His prior experience using Excel during a META Lab project with Gathering for Women, as well as his experience leading our Excel Geek-Ins helped him tremendously during his practicum. He expressed that, “being able to look at data and understand it was very beneficial”.

According to Grant, one of the unique characteristics of the META lab is that it gives MIIS students the opportunity to engage in long term projects, even though our time at MIIS is quite short. In other words, you can work on ambitious projects that multiple students have contributed to, extending both before and after your time at MIIS.In terms of how the skills he’s developed at the META lab have helped him with job applications, he emphasized: “Everyone wants to know you can do Excel”.

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