Friday, April 1, 2011

Canadian J1 visa data: sanity check failed

Being sick was an excuse for me to playing around with R and this dataset from data.gov. If you're a Waterloo student and you did an internship in the US, you might find the below plot to not quite add up...

If I recall correctly, both in 2008 and 2009 the number of people attending the US Visa info session was well over 100. In fact, the summer 2009 contact sheet for Waterloo students interning in California alone contains 41 names -- that's NOT even including students doing their co-ops in other places in the US and in the fall/winter terms.

Alas, I wonder how trustworthy other numbers listed in this and other datasets are. It's too bad that we can't sanity check other datasets in a similar, direct fashion.

End of Entry