This summer I worked as an educational policy research assistant at the Urban Institute. I worked on a number of projects dealing with both K-12 education and higher education. Some of the more prominent topics were the use of Free or Reduced Priced lunch program participation as a proxy for poverty in research, how public school transportation (or lack thereof) affects student access to schools of choice and how student loan debt has affected the nation’s economy and the lives of borrowers. My time as a research assistant involved finding, cleaning and standardizing datasets, creating summary statistics, and performing literature reviews for the pertinent research topics. I was also a part of the brainstorming process for a proposal on how to share student debt risk with their respective colleges.