As key liaison and primary foreign representation of the French government, the Embassy of France serves to engage in issues of diplomacy, policy and the interests of France and its citizens within the United States. Located in Washington, the Embassy is headed by the French Ambassador who oversees its operations, including the operations of regional consulates located throughout the US. While the French Embassy maintains a number of services, the embassy’s priorities often include military coordination, cultural awareness, economic affairs, and matters regarding the communications and the press.
As part of its focus on cultural services, the Embassy plays a key role in promoting opportunities and advocating for programs abroad. In reviewing their enrollment, the Embassy has noticed a decline that it believes is in part due to a visitor’s ability to find or discover opportunities available to them. Currently, those opportunities are bridged by a secondary site, frenchculture.org, that serves a number of roles in addition to hosting those abroad opportunities. Moving forward, an assessment of the current state should provide recommendations on ways to engage users more efficiently, convert visitors and provide more prominence and clarity to programs available.
Moreover, understanding the current students that are opting to study abroad and producing a clear narrative for why these outcomes are present is essential to ensuring future cultural integration. The Embassy has provided anonymized 2016 visa data. Participants should breakdown the information: what are the basic demographics of the students studying in France, from where are students coming, to what universities are they visiting, what opportunities exist between programs available and matriculation, and more. The Embassy is particularly interested in analyzing how many students opt to study abroad per US-divided region. (Are some regional directors yielding a higher number of students with the same backgrounds?) This provided dataset is the start not the end: participants are welcome to bring in outside datasets and include attribution. Additional opportunities for doing so is available in Resources.
Every team will present a 6 minute pitch (you will be cut off!) on their findings to the judges panel at 7:30 PM.
Presentations must include:
- A proven data analysis of contextualizing current study abroad figures. Given this context, provide recommendations for how the Embassy can increase their reach to encourage additional students
- Recommendations for improving French Embassy resources, particularly well-researched proposals surrounding a better user experience on frenchculture.org
Note that recommendations can take the form of recommended additional survey information the Embassy should collect for when applicable, competitive analysis, sketched or working prototypes, interactive data visualizations, and more. Your presentation should begin with topline findings, and unpack those findings based on the results of your quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Teams are three to four people. Given the data analysis, user experience, and (potentially live) deployment component of your task, including a diversity of skillsets should be a priority. A team that has fully deployed interactive data visualization components may provide impressive analysis, but will lack recommendations for improving the experience to end users seeking additional study abroad information. Likewise, well-researched and prototyped solutions that lack data-inforced findings (particularly of the provided visa dataset) will lack quantitative validity.
The Embassy has compiled a host of resources for your success, including lists of universities that students opt to attend and open sourcing visa information.
Submissions must be submitted via pull request to the submissions folder by 7:00 PM.
To submit, create a folder within the submission folder with your team name. In that folder, place your submission materials. All submissions must include the presentation materials your group is leveraging, whether this ranges from a PDF of a PPT to links (in a mardown file) to working prototypes and deployed visualization tools. (Bear in mind you cannot add files in excess of 100MB to your Github: you should save your presentation as a PDF)
If you need help with pull requests, find Joseph in advance of the 7:00 PM deadline. Please also view this resource
Our judging panel has three distinguished guests:
Christel Outreman is the current University Attache at the French Embassy in the US. Christel has a passion for assuring the success of student cultural integration.
Natalie Cox is a program manager for French Immersion Programs in the US. Natalie completed her Master's degree in France.
Shanaz Chowdhery is the Regional Director for General Assembly DC. As a self-declared "amateur coder," Shanaz understands the technical challenges of implementing your given solutions, as well as assessing their value to end users.
The criteria is available here.
There will be two workshops throughout the day.
At 12:30 (during lunch), Joseph will be hosting "Intro to Data Analysis using Python." At 4:00 PM, Joseph will be hosting "Creating Your Own Personal Site with Bootstrap." Both of these workshops assume you have zero background in their respective field. (How introductory? We will even begin with creating [assuring] Github accounts [exist] for both.)
We will communicate via Slack.
Join our team via this link.
