“I like to learn new things, I’m curious. I think open data can make for more informed people.”

Background

Sarah is currently majoring in computer science, and dreams of being a developer for Facebook. She grew up in Jamaica, Queens, where her parents encouraged her early interest in physics and math. For as long as she can remember, she has been interested in solving everyday problems through numbers.

Even though she has lived in Queens her whole life, Sarah doesn’t feel particularly connected to her community—but she is very close to her family. Her parents run a business selling accessories to local stores and she is always looking for ways to apply what she is learning in school to helping her family. Last year, Sarah and her brother conducted a survey of 60 customers, gathering valuable information about price sensitivity and preferences. Her analysis of the survey results helped her family tailor their business to provide what people wanted.

Experience Using Open Data

Sarah mostly accesses data at school and has learned that businesses can benefit from data and research. The value of Open data, however, isn’t clear to her. She doesn’t see a direct application for the data she found on the Open Data portal, beyond making people more informed.

In one of Sarah’s classes, her instructor told her to choose a dataset from the NYC Open Data Portal to use for a data visualization project. She downloaded a dataset on noise complaints in Queens, because she remembered some loud construction near her house a few months ago. She thought it was cool that the city had pulled together all that data and enjoyed creating the visualization. But she didn’t see what else she could do with it and doesn’t imagine herself using the portal except for a school assignment like this one.

In contrast, Sarah recalls another assignment for a physics class that asked her to solve a problem related to her daily life. She took the opportunity to determine the optimal arm angle to throw a basketball. When she was able to get the information to analyze and solve that problem, she was excited to apply it because she could see how it could help improve her game.