When preparing for the last symposium, I thought about my entire eighteen years of IR experience at three different institutions, especially when I served as the MIRO Director from July 2012 to January 2023. I was engaged in some serious reflection about my journey as an institutional researcher. After long and careful consideration, I have decided to take a break from my IR career after January 2023. 

As I’m wrapping up a major chapter of my professional life, these are some of the key things I’ve learned along the way. They are also the reasons behind the choices I made to design and manage the MIRO office.

First of all, I learned that data is power. Those who have more access to data and analysis are more influential in decision-making. As institutional researchers, we need to consider how we balance our time when serving different groups on campus. I chose to prioritize efforts that could create equal data access for all employees, because I believe this helps establish a more balanced power structure on campus and creates a more equitable negotiation landscape between different stakeholders.

Secondly, I learned that data is complicated. Even a seemingly simple and straightforward number – like graduation rate or how to count students of an ethnic group – can be affected by many factors and decisions. People are less likely to trust or use data provided by the IR office for decision-making, if they don’t understand how data is prepared and reported, and this defeats the core purpose of institutional research. Data communication and education, therefore, should be framed as important aspects of the IR job.

Thirdly, I learned that data and actionable data are two different things. We often see data users repeatedly return to ask for more data; this leads to the question as to whether or not the data we give them is always the right kind of information to provide users with optimal clarity. Most of the time, when we talk about data in IR, we refer to numbers. Numbers can show us historical trends or what the future might look like based on historical data we can access, but numbers are not so helpful in showing us causality or guiding us towards effective action. On the contrary, we have seen people motivated and committed to make changes only after hearing the real voices of students and employees. That’s why our office has done so much work in collecting open-ended survey data and invented tools to help people more efficiently use qualitative data.  

Last but not least, I learned that data is a double-edged sword. It can help us see trends and patterns, but it can also generate in us a tendency to make large-scale decisions that ignore individual experiences. We’ve made an effort, therefore, to promote qualitative data that reflects different life experiences and challenges. Our effort also applies to programs and offices that serve different purposes and have unique characteristics. So we’ve purposefully designed the majority of MIRO web apps to focus on showing data about individual programs and student groups rather than comparative statistics on diverse units or offices.  

I would like to encourage my fellow institutional research colleagues to pause during our busy life and work, and think about the impacts of our choices and efforts in our community. Such reflection can help us clarify the values rooted in our choices, so we can conduct our IR work in a more purposeful way. 

The MIRO office is currently in great shape. Our team is strong, engaged, and effective, and our work is streamlined and stabilized. Over the years, many have helped to build this office, such as John Stanley, Ryan Bungard, Kim Shire, Kelly Lin, David Iannucci, Erick Yamanaka, Sonya Smyk, Marc Arakaki, Bryson McFeeley, Michelle Carino, Melissa Martinez, Hanna Park, Karese Kaw-uh, and our wonderful student assistants. They have all made special contributions to the MIRO office using their unique skill sets and diverse perspectives.

MIRO could not have achieved so much without the strong support from the Provost’s Office (and the former Office of Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs), and collaborations from the many offices at UH Mānoa and the University of Hawaiʻi System Offices, who generously shared their knowledge and expertise, provided data and resources, and collaborated with us on many projects over the years. A heartfelt mahalo goes out to all the dedicated colleagues and courageous leaders; most importantly, we thank our students and professors, who are front and center in all the work we do at the university. 

I hope MIRO can continue to evolve and thrive under the new leadership, and the information and resources we share with the broader IR community will be helpful to our colleagues in some way.

Mahalo, a hui hou.

Yang Zhang, Ph.D., MBA

MIRO Director, 2012-2023