With more than 25 years at Penn State, Nugent reflects on how he got his start, the progression of OPAIR and what really matters in his work.
TELL US HOW LONG YOU’VE BEEN WITH OPAIR.
That’s an interesting question. I started with this department in July 2018 when it was known as the Office of Planning and Assessment (OPA). Prior to that – believe it or not – I began my Penn State career in 1996 with the University’s Center for Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), before it became the Office of Planning and Institutional Assessment (OPIA), the predecessor to OPA. I was with that office through December 2014, so just over 18 years.
Before that, I worked in the Computational and Spatial Analysis Core of the Social Science and Population Research Institutes and the University Budget Office before I eventually came to the current OPAIR four years ago.
THAT’S QUITE AN EVOLUTION!
It really has been! People have asked me how I got my job at the University in hopes of working here themselves, though I tell them I don’t necessarily recommend they go my route. When I came to Penn State as a first-year student, I started out as a pre-med major and ended up with a degree in Health Policy and Administration.
After graduation, I stayed in the State College area and eventually found myself in need of a paycheck. I landed a job with a temp agency which got me into CQI. Right around the same time, CQI merged with the former planning and assessment office, and that job turned into a full-time staff assistant position.
HOW DID THAT PROGRESS INTO YOUR CURRENT POSITION AS A DATA AND REPORTING ANALYST?
I mentioned this was not a straight course! After a couple of years, the office had an opening for a programming position. This was the late 90s, so anyone with actual programming credentials was taking off to the Silicon Valley, leaving people like me who basically dabbled with computers up to that point.
My friends and I all had the same level of computer experience back then. We had had some computer programming classes in high school and college, but most of us were playing computer games and that kind of thing. Once I got out into the workforce, I realized there was actually a strategic advantage to my skills. Until then, I didn’t even have computer experience on my resume!
I loved the programming job, but always felt like I needed to earn that label, so I’ve worked really hard over the years to learn more about what it takes to be a professional programmer. I made it my professional development mission to continually educate myself in this field.
WHAT ABOUT NOW? WHAT DO YOUR CURRENT JOB RESPONSIBILITIES LOOK LIKE? WHAT IS IT THAT KEEPS YOU IN THIS LINE OF WORK?
The best way to describe my position as a data and reporting analyst is probably to say I handle a number of external reporting responsibilities. One of my roles is generating the enrollment data that are used for reporting to the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS. There are also a number of other international rankings surveys that I’m responsible for.
I’m currently working on the State Mandated Collection System (SMCS), which we use to collect faculty activity data to meet the requirements mandated in the appropriation bill that was enacted by Pennsylvania’s General Assembly.
Faculty use this tool to report the hours they typically spend in any given week in a number of different categories, like how much time they spend on instruction related activities, how much time they spend on research related activities and so on. Those data then feed into the SMCS and are submitted to the Joint State Government Commission of the State General Assembly.
This web application is something we’re focused on now. We recently took over running and maintaining the app and have made some enhancements to it based on user feedback., and we’re working with Penn State IT to re-engineer the app to improve its overall functionality and ease-of-use.
TALK ABOUT HOW THE OFFICE HAS GROWN DURING THE TIME THAT YOU’VE BEEN HERE.
We’ve grown tremendously! When I came to OPAIR from the Budget Office, there were seven of us, I think, and we basically doubled the size of the department taking it from maybe nine to something like 12 or 15 people.
Since 2018, we’ve added a business intelligence team, a project management professional, and a few other new hires. Additional team members were added to work in assessment, we added institutional research to the team, and brought on additional support staff bringing us to where we are now at around forty staff.
Sure, there are always some growing pains when you expand like this, but I appreciate the direction we’re moving and I’m proud of the important work we all do.
AND FINALLY, TELL US WHAT MOTIVATES YOU IN YOUR JOB.
You know, a lot of my work isn’t something I can necessarily point to and say, “Look at this IPEDS submission, isn’t that fantastic?”. What drives me is looking at my work as a process and focusing on ways to be efficient and effective with that process – being proactive and making sure that I’m addressing all of the potential issues and working out the bugs. The moments that I take the most pride in are when I feel confident that because of that attention to detail, somebody could step in and take over my project and they’d be looking at this code saying, “Wow, whoever wrote this, really knew what they were doing.”
There was a book I read years ago that referenced the days of the craftspeople and masons, and how they would always sign their work. Every mason that carved a stone would make their mark in the stone so it would be know who carved it. They wanted their work to be a pride point because their name was going to be attached to that stone for eternity.
So while my work may not always be as tangible as others,’ for me it really comes down to more of, you know, when I retire and somebody takes over my projects, they’re going to say, “Wow, this guy was really good at what he did. He cared about his work.” I want it to be something I could sign my name to.