Thoughts from a Registrar

Dan Wilson, Registrar at Muskingum University, recently talked with us  about some of the reports he's been working on, how he's using Veera, and his upcoming webinar. 
CG - What types of reports are usually on your plate?

DW - Some of the reports I'll be talking about in the webinar include:

• historical registrations by date,
• historical majors by semester,
• number of students still needing to take specific general education courses, 
• graduation persistence by major, 
• retention rates by various factors, and
• DWF (drop/withdraw/fail) rates by course.

I have one report for each of these and I make minor adjustments to it each time a new question is asked. 

CG - How has Veera helped with your reporting?

DW - It's helped me develop complex reports that would have taken me 4-6 hours each to get all the data, build, and run. Now I pull up a report and run it in about a minute. It's especially useful for complicated and repetitious reports. 

All of the reports I've mentioned have been automated in Veera. Everything that I can, I automate. I anticipate that people might be asking for DWF rate for the first year students, or by division, or by course, or by phase of the moon. Veera is good at pulling that data together and allowing me to tweak it and make adjustments as needed. I usually choose to work with Veera when I think I'll see a lot of revisions, need to do some digging around, or can see similar questions being framed differently. 

The year-over-year registrations by date report was one of the first I created using Veera. It's proven to be one of the most valuable to our administration in helping improve our retention rates. It literally takes two minutes to run - it actually takes longer to download the data file than it does to run the report in Veera.

CG - What do you hope attendees will take away from your webinar?

DW - I hope each person will find something that is a spark moment for them. Some people need exposure to Veera and to see what it can do. For users, I'm hoping to spark a brainstorm on how and why to use Veera - as the way to achieve what they need faster and easier. 

CG- Anything else you'd like to add?

DW - Anyone who knows what a small college registrar does will understand that I wear many, many hats. Though I'm not an institutional researcher, some of the work that I do is borderline IR. Typically I'm asked a question and need to get someone the answer quickly. That's what I use Veera for the most. 


For more information or to register for Dan's upcoming webinar, Digging Deep into Data: How a Small University's Registrar Develops Complex and Repeatable Mission-Critical reports, click here. 

Customer Tips From... Dan Wilson (Muskingum University)

Our next set of customer tips comes from Dan Wilson, Registrar at Muskingum University. Dan typically uses Veera for repetitive and/or complex reports, including multi-year enrollment history by date, historical majors and minors (by year and department), and IPEDS reporting. Here are his tips:

1. It is important to remember the merge characteristics (all from a, all from b, all from both, only matching, etc.) so the last thing I do in developing any report is to verify each of these. 

2. While Veera's CrossTab feature is quite useful, I find it easier and more familiar to output my results to a target excel file, and then have another excel spreadsheet with my pivot table that has all of the formatting and other features set up. That way I can update the data file without overwriting my formatted "results" file. The same can be done with separate sheets in a file, but some of my reporting files pull data from different queries and Veera reports. For those reports I can run data from several sources, then open up my main file and hit "refresh". 

3. For those instances when a transform looks like a computer program, I'll break it into smaller bits and spread it out over several nodes. This allows me to test smaller chunks of the function at a time and locate any errant code prior to needing valium. (Editor's note: using the de-bugger in the Transform node can also help to find errors quickly!)

...Have tips of your own? Email them to caitlin.garrett@rapidinsightinc.com!