by Sarah Rose :

It is a joy to introduce you to Michael Hvizdos, our 2023 Catholic Community Connection Summer Fellow in the Performance Improvement Department of Cleveland Catholic Charities.

Michael is a student at John Carroll University majoring in Data Science and minoring in Sociology. He will graduate in 2025. Michael stated that he finds himself lucky to have had this Summer Fellow position in his field of study “fall into his lap” after his original position in another organization fell through.

Working in the Performance Improvement Department of Cleveland Catholic Charities, Michael gathers and analyzes data to help improve the organization as a whole. He works alongside 60 different onsite programs and 150 programs all together in the organization. Although he has only worked with a small portion of those, by using technology and data analysis, Michael has been able to apply what he’s learned in college to aid in the help of addressing some of the issues facing the Cleveland community.

Currently, Michael is working on coding a program to help Catholic Charities more efficiently keep track of their lists of active and terminated employees. “It’s been nice to use the coding languages of Python and SQL in a real work place environment and, on top of that, I’ve gotten to see the data collection process. We do data manipulating in the classroom, but not collecting or using a lot of surveys which have aided in that.” He very much enjoyed being in a work environment with a great team to work alongside.

Michael says that his supervisor (Becca D’Andrea) has provided him with all of the instructions of what he needs to do for his position. Additionally, “in the Human Resource Department they’ve been needing some assistance with the coding side of things, like coding Python, and she’s basically given me the logic (or the problem that’s going on) and I’ve been able to use what I’ve got to fix that and on top of that I’ve been also aiding them in creating surveys for the organization.”

In the future, Michael hopes to work in the agricultural manufacturing field. “I grew up an outdoorsy guy, so I really like the agricultural manufacturing side of things – something that would combine technology with special interests.”