Outreachy report #19: March 2021
As Sage focused on efforts to increase the amount of internships we would offer this round, I decided to spent most of my work hours on processing applications. My records say I’ve spent over 100 hours in this particular task, and how burned out I’ve felt since definitely shows how much work I’ve put into it. By the end of the application processing period, I could barely look at our dashboard’s UI. In hour final processing hours, I had to abandon any efforts to actually read any new pending applications and focus on double-checking apps that had already been reviewed by others because I could feel my brain refusing to perform as expected for that task.
It’s difficult to think of ways to improve the way we review applications when this task is repetitive by nature and many of the things we have to review can’t be changed. It’s also quite tough to maintain a constant rate of reviewed apps per day when the time you spend reading them varies so much and you can’t predict how a particular application will affect you. I had a couple of moments where I’d read a particularly sad or graphic application and I just couldn’t resume working that day – I had to take a break from applications for my own mental health’s sake.
Those factors make me worry about how scalable our current workflows are. Adding more applicantion reviewers definitely helped us process more applications than last year, but we still had a significant amount left. With that in mind, I believe we only have two options:
- Decreasing the amount of time spent on items we review by limiting the amount of characters in each essay answer and/or stopping to review academic calendars altogether. I’d say that long essay answers and inaccessible academic calendars are the top 2 reasons why I’d spend 15+ minutes processing an application. When there’s thousands of applications to review, that number adds up quickly.
- Putting a cap on the amount of people we allow to apply. This could happen if we find that the amount of excess applications we received this round weren’t caused by a temporary increase in interest due to the pandemic but by an increased popularity of the program, and adding more application reviewers isn’t sufficient.
There’s also a need to revamp the application review workflow and its UI. I plan on interviewing our new applicant reviewers to see how was their first-hand experience with application review, and see if they have any feedback to help us evaluate what things we should change in the short and long-term. I’m also seeking advice from designer friends to find valuable resources to help us design interfaces that focus on the most important information for decision-making while trying to mitigate phenomenons such as semantic satiation and tunnel vision (two things I’ve experienced during application processing hours).