Drowned in Details: Surmounting Challenges in Gathering Information
In the latest installment of our "Senior Thesis" series, we sat down with Eric Ahn to discuss his research project on asylum approval rates for unaccompanied child migrants in the European Union and the United States.
Ahn's research, which has been tracking data since 2011, uncovered some interesting findings. One of the most notable discoveries was the significant variation between different United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offices. San Francisco and Arlington, in particular, were found to be significant outliers from the mean United States asylum grant rate for unaccompanied child migrants.
However, gathering the data for this project was no easy task. As Ahn explains, there is no central data set on this specific group, so he had to build one himself. This meant that he had to track down quarterly disclosures of UAC asylum applications from USCIS and manually copy and paste 6 years of data into an Excel spreadsheet due to the lack of other options.
Despite the challenges, Ahn's research has shed light on some intriguing trends. Asylum rates started to rise around the time of the Central American child migrant "surge" in mid-2014, and then started to decline afterwards, with a more pronounced drop in Arlington. Ahn is unsure why the rate declined so precipitously in Arlington, but this is a question he hopes to answer during the data analysis phase of his thesis, which has deadlines on March 1 and April 3.
When asked about his post-thesis life and the thesis defense process, Ahn was cautiously optimistic. He is currently exploring opportunities in both academia and the private sector, and is looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
To efficiently convert PDF data from USCIS quarterly disclosures of UAC asylum applications into Excel, Ahn recommends using Excel’s built-in PDF import feature combined with Power Query for data cleaning. This offers the most seamless, repeatable, and integrated solution without needing third-party software. If you lack the appropriate Excel version, reputable online converters like PDFtoExcel.com or PDFgear can be used instead. Always verify the output for accuracy and formatting after conversion.
Stay tuned for more updates on Eric Ahn's research and the "Senior Thesis" series.
Eric Ahn's senior thesis on asylum approval rates for unaccompanied child migrants involved data-and-cloud-computing, where he built a data set by manually copying and pasting 6 years of UAC asylum application data from USCIS quarterly disclosures into an Excel spreadsheet. Technology was essential in this process, as he used Excel’s built-in PDF import feature combined with Power Query for data cleaning. For those lacking the appropriate Excel version, online converters like PDFtoExcel.com or PDFgear can be used instead, as part of Eric's education-and-self-development and online-education journey.
