Adelaide University Internships - Millicent Jesslyn Danli
Welcome Jesslyn!
Millicent Jesslyn Danli joined our Data Analytics Team for her Adelaide University ECMS (Engineering Computer Sciences, Mathematics and Sciences) Internship for Information Technology on the 25 July 2022 - 2 October 2022 for Semester 2, 2022. Jesslyn completed a 270 hour internship onsite at the Connecting Up Office 22.5 hours over 3 days each week for 12 weeks.
After graduating from her Information Technology degree and home to Indonesia, Jesslyn returned to Adelaide and Connecting Up on the 14 February 2023 in a volunteer capacity to continue her work in the Data Analytics team remotely. She contributed to the team at night whilst working casually in the restaurant industry during the day, and searching and applying for jobs related to her degree and studies. Jesslyn completed a total of 352 hours in total with the SAcommunity program ~82 this year extracting Google Analytics data for council reports and continuing her professional development through Connecting Up training and education webinars.
We are pleased to announce that Jesslyn has retired from the team as she has begun work on the 9 October 2023 as an Information and Digital Support Officer with Relationships Australia SA. Congratulations Jesslyn!!
Personal Biography
Jesslyn is a third-year Information Technology student at the University of Adelaide, majoring in Cyber Security. As an international student, she is also on the committee for the Indonesian Students Association of South Australia (PPIA) to assist and support the group in hosting some of the many special activities and events held for Indonesian students.
She has joined the SAcommunity Team as an intern at Connecting Up to gain more real-work experience in the working environment in Australia. Jesslyn hopes that being part of the Data Analytics Team will help her to further investigate the practical uses of information technology in the field, explore her interest in digital marketing, build on her academic skillset and develop her interpersonal skills, all learned traits she believes will be helpful for her future career.
Jesslyn will finish her degree at the end of 2022 and plans to utilise her academic studies and work in the broad information technology field, across a range of areas such as digital marketing, and in particular digital channels such as social media, as well as in data analysis, towards discovering useful information and supporting decision-making.
Community Services in Councils Statistics Project
Jesslyn has been working on the Council Statistics project for the City of Victor Harbor, creating reports utilising Google Analytics, Power BI and Canva with training and documentation from volunteer Stathis Avramis. These reports present the 238 community services listed in the directory operating within the council area and provide an indication of service demand to assist with council decision making, awareness or research.
Data analytics exercises, require data cleaning as analytics reports rely on good data, and Jesslyn has sourced, re-checked and cleaned the dataset for her council, adding divisions including groups, councils and electorates improving the SAcommunity database and service listings. She has also revised multiple other council reports and datasets to subsequently improve the information generated from these.
Council partner consultation and engagement is also important, and Jesslyn contacted Victor Harbor council library by phone to introduce and present the community service information and report. She has also emailed several council offices and relevant members in council roles: such as community development, tourism and events and public library staff, sending them links to reports she has updated for councils using information currently held. These councils include Coober Pedy, Coorong, Cleve, Victor Harbour, Copper Coast, Goyder, Barunda West, Clare and Gilbert Valleys, Kimba, Lower Eyre Peninsula, Grant and Kingston for decision-making, and with options to access data exports that can be utilised for e-campaigns for community grants, consultation and research by councils.
Jesslyn has assisted the Media & Communications Team, using Canva to create an Instagram post for the Prospect Community Garden re-opening and by introducing the Perhimpunan Pelajar Indonesia South Australia (PPIA-SA) service as she is a member of this organisation for International Indonesian students. Jesslyn gained permission and added the SA-based service and it's sub-branches at Adelaide, UniSA and Flinders Universities to the SAcommunity database and assisted us in gaining an interview with their president for an media article. She assisted the Community Service Team/Visual Design Team by using Canva to create logos for records to allow users to quickly differentiate and understand a service's activities visually in the directory, to find the information they are looking for.
Jesslyn also created Instagram posts in the SAcommunity channel to promote and present the reports she has created on community services operating across various council areas. This channel reaches new audiences and Jesslyn has used this media to introduce the SAcommunity Service, Data Analytics Team, Statistics Reports along with Canva and Power BI Report examples as well as reports on services operating in Victor Harbor for the financial years 2019-2020, 2020-2021 and 2021-2022.
Millicent Jesslyn Danli with one of the five Data Analytics training videos she has created for future interns and volunteers
Capacity Building Project
Jesslyn utilised TechSmith's Camtasia software suite for creating and recording video tutorials, she has editing skills and an interest in this area having previously used the VN app for her personal Instagram videos. The training and educational video presentations she developed as part of the Volunteer Capacity Building Team: 'Selecting a Council', 'Preparing an Excel File', 'Cleaning Data', 'Finding missing records', 'Working with Power BI' and 'Creating Reports with Canva' is based on the documentation and training provided by Volunteer Stathis Avramis. The modules will inform and assist future interns and volunteers in organising and checking records in the dataset ahead of creating reports for councils.
Work Experience
To experience a local office environment, Jesslyn attended the monthly SAcommunity Team meetings on 3 August 2022, and 7 September 2022. She sat in on an online staff meeting with Xavier Goldie, Senior Data Analyst, participated in the monthly Connecting Up All Staff meetings on the 9 August 2022 and was immersed in all Infoxchange staff activities offered including opportunities for joining in weekly online reiki or meditation sessions, Yammar staff news and staff weekly updates from the CEO, David Spriggs.
Lunch & Learn
Jesslyn attended fortnightly Lunch & Learn initiatives from Infoxchange's People and Culture department, starting on the 30 August 2022, all as part of experiencing a professional office environment. Topics include 'Building a Brand & Compelling Narrative in PowerPoint (30/8)' and Hacking Powerpoint like a Pro (27/9)' hosted by Breanna Osborn from Capgemini. In addition, Jesslyn attended a training session on mental health health facilitated by Beti Kordanovski from the Black Dog Institute called 'Understanding and Managing your Mental Health' to assist in improving mental health literacy and promoting workforce wellbeing. All sessions are designed to provide staff and students with insights and advice for their work-life.
Training and Development
Jesslyn has had the opportunity to understand more about data analytics in the not-for-profit sector, and was provided with access to the Connecting Up Digital Learning platform, a training and development online learning platform with a selection of relevant live webinars and recorded webinars, workshops and webcons from a range of subject-matter experts who also have a deep experience with not-for-profits.
Relevant webinars, workshops and webcons Jesslyn has undertaken have included:
Excel for databases - tips and tricks
How to organise people and data to build a thriving community
Data readiness
Decisions with data
Getting Started with Google Analytics
Generating Insights from Google Analytics
Gain a clear understanding of your organisation's data and impact using Power BI
Learning Canva in Your Office (Canva is used for Data Analytics report presentations)
Become a Canva King or Queen
Preventing a Data Disaster
The Leading Edge of Cyber Security Webcon 2022
Explores the different aspects of Cyber Security in 2022, new knowledge and skills to apply to your own organisations cyber security strategy (Jesslyn is currently studying Cybersecurity at university)
Session 1: Combating the Mess of Cyber Standards Facing NFP - Andrew Robinson, 6clicks
Session 2: Real World Cyber Crime and how to best protect your organisation - Connon Daly, The I.T. Team
Session 3: Why cybercriminals want it and the 5 steps you should take to securing your precious NFP organization data and IT - Susie Jones, Cynch Security
Session 4: The legal and regulatory landscape for NFPs impacted by a cyber incident - Stefanie Luhrs, Clyde&Co
The modern not for profit - becoming the "data driven enterprise"
A 4-part webinar series providing an understanding of search engine optimisation, steps to impact search engine rankings, how to develop target audience personas for their online audience and use social media advertising to reach them, how to ensure your website presence is optimized for conversions, and strategies to build an email marketing database.
Session 1: Help your stakeholders to find you online
Session 2: Generating online traffic using social media and advertising
Session 3: Engage your customers and drive action on your website
Session 4: Capturing leads and marketing with EDMs
Session 1: Help your stakeholders to find you online
Session 2: Generating online traffic using social media and advertising
Session 3: Engage your customers and drive action on your website
Session 4: Capturing leads and marketing with EDMs
Image: Thiya Reddy, Infoxchange Project Manager and Senior Business Analyst
Mentor Meeting
Jesslyn also met with her chosen mentor Thiya Reddy, Infoxchange Project Manager and Senior Business Analyst on the 10 August 2022. During this meeting Thiya discussed Jesslyn's professional interests, answered her questions on business analysis and project management, and gained a brief overview of problem solving approaches (waterfall, agile, scrum), stakeholder management and business development, the importance of social connections and networks, and the next steps she can take to discovering potential career pathways.
Jesslyn outlined her five takeaways from the mentor meeting:
1. Take the opportunity to do anything and everything because you will not know if you will like something or not unless you undertake it first
2. Define the values that you want to achieve as it will help you to determine your career path
3. Prioritize your growth and opportunities
4. The importance of making social connections
5. Find the balance point between something that you are good at and something that you actually like
GovHack Connections Event
Jesslyn assisted with promoting the SAcommunity open dataset available on Data.SA in front of more than 60 competition participants at the GovHack Connections event Wednesday 10 August 2022. The Connections event explains the competition and answers questions ahead of the GovHack 46 hour competition (held 19-21 August 2022), which challenges participants to utilise open data and create a prototype concept to solve complex social issues and communicate this via video in a festival of ideas. SAcommunity open data is one of many, many open government datasets available that can be utilised to answer various Sponsor challenges as participants compete for various prizes.
Millicent Jesslyn Danli at GovHack Connections Event 10 August 2022
GovHack Connections was opened by MC Darrell Klar and GovHack SA Lead and Board Director Hoss Mohsenian, featured GovHack sponsors including The City of Adelaide, Regional Development Australia - Barossa, Gawler, Light and Adelaide Plains with representatives Zac McCrindle and Kavya Majana, The Department of Primary Industries and Regions (PIRSA), Government of South Australia, with representatives Benjamin Bittner and Robyn Terry. Other sponsors included Torrens University Australia, RAA, Australian Computer Society, Inspiring South Australia, South Australian Leaders and more.
Intern Millicent Jesslyn Danli and SAcommunity Community Services Directory Manager, Catherine McIntyre presenting at GovHack Connections Event.
Information and advice was provided by mentors, Peter Habel, Jeannine Malcolm and Catherine McIntyre (from SAcommunity) with instructions from Zaidul Alam, GovHack Data Lead and Board Director. While a Q & A session was presented from GovHack Volunteers and previous participants (including former SAcommunity volunteer Alison Do) to assist the more than 60 connections participants to find out more successful tips and create peer-to-peer connections for the upcoming GovHack Competition on the 19 - 21 August 2022.
Interns Millicent Jesslyn Danli, Taylor Alland and Julia Koh at the Adelaide Infoxchange Office
"I am really glad that I completed my internship program with SAcommunity at Infoxchange. I had a really great time while doing my internship here in the Connecting Up office as everyone is very friendly and helpful. As a Data Analytics Intern, I learned a lot about cleaning, managing data records and presenting data using Power BI and Canva.
I would like to thank the SAcommunity Team for having me and allowing to explore the various aspects of the service, especially in social media. SAcommunity has helped me to develop my academic and interpersonal skills, which I believe will be helpful for my future career. I am looking forward to finishing my degree in Information Technology this year and applying for jobs relating to social media or data analysis in Adelaide or across Australia."
- Millicent Jesslyn Danli
Editors Note: Welcome Back
We are pleased to note that Jesslyn returned this year on 14 February 2023 to become a volunteer with SAcommunity at Connecting Up for a few hours a week whilst she searches for work in her field, and we are glad to see her again.
Jesslyn will be working remotely around her casual day-shifts and look at continuing the types of data analytics tasks she undertook for her internship, recently contacting and cleaning datasets including Orrorroo and Victor Harbor Council along with accessing professional development opportunities available to volunteers through Connecting Up.
Welcome back Jesslyn!
SAcommunity Data Analytics Team Volunteers: Millicent Jesslyn Danli, with Govinda Gurung and Stathis Avramis
Editors note: Farewell Jesslyn and all the best!
Jesslyn has been volunteering as part of the Data Analytics Team at SAcommunity since February on a remote basis whilst working on a casual basis in customer service and as a kitchen hand for a restaurant during the day, and we are pleased to note that as of 9 October, she has now started with Relationships Australia SA as an Information and Digital Support Officer - Congratulations and Farewell!
"Hi Catherine! I just want to let you know that I got the offer and I will be starting work next week! Thank you very much for everything! All the best for you and also the other volunteers!"
Return to Welcome New Volunteers and Interns Semester 2, 2022
