Product Management at USAFacts and the Penn Wharton Budget Model

usafacts_finances.png
 

This past summer, I interned at USAFacts and the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM). The goal of USAFacts is:

To make government data more transparent to the American public

 
 

Even though I can’t show the specifics of what I worked on at USAFacts/PWBM, my role as a product management intern focused on product testing and development. Using Python, I created a program that validated the data obtained from a new API tool with manually scraped information. Because of my program, we were able to detect inconsistencies in over 2,000 data points and identify the causes of these errors!

 
*Data animation of 1,000 income forecasts from 2018 to 2065 for an individual who is white, male, aged 25, goes to college, and currently earns roughly $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

*Data animation of 1,000 income forecasts from 2018 to 2065 for an individual who is white, male, aged 25, goes to college, and currently earns roughly $50,000 to $100,000 a year.

 

I was also tasked with making data animations that showed the forecasts for an individual’s income based off of their demographic characteristics like gender, sex, marital status, race, education, etc. The purpose of the animation demo was to compare how people’s earning potentials could be changed based off of new policy changes. I created a data visualization that showed thousands of potential forecasts of an individual based on his or her demographic parameters.