ASHLEY WEI: Hello and welcome to behind the scenes of NU in Bloom. We’re super excited to talk about The Daily Spring 2026 Poll. Twice a year, we ask undergraduate students at Northwestern about their opinions on campus culture and beyond.
ASHLEY WEI: From The Daily Northwestern, I’m Ashley Wei.
CYDNEY WATERMAN: I’m Cydney Waterman.
CAROLINE ALTSCHUL: And I’m Caroline Altschul.
ASHLEY WEI: We had a lot of fun bringing back old questions and seeing how things have changed, but also bringing in some new questions to keep it fresh and get the pulse on the NU experience.
CYDNEY WATERMAN: We wanted to give the student body a voice in order to share the issues that matter to them. So many things have changed since the fall, and it’s important for the wider community to understand how everyone’s feeling as it fosters a greater sense of belonging on campus. And with our 540 responses, our goal is to look into our campus community as a collective body.
What was interesting about the poll is that it’s a unique piece of media, as we can look at student perspectives in a more data-driven and analytical lens that we normally can’t do with other forms of reporting.
CAROLINE ALTSCHUL: So, in terms of how we actually went about coming up with the questions, we definitely wanted some for continuity, so a lot of those were in the well-being section or also campus and certain national issues as well, so that we could see how responses changed over the quarters. Or, we also added new ones that have recently become more relevant, such as asking about (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the national politics section. We also added some that are only relevant for the Spring Quarter specifically, such as where students went for Spring Break and what their summer plans are.
And then, we got creative and added some that just seemed fun and engaging. One of the biggest hits was definitely “When did you last cry and where?” — everybody thought it was hilarious. We were super proud of that one, but I mean, specifically, I was definitely really excited about how different variables within the well-being section changed because so much happens in the NU year.
Everything moves so fast and there’s always so much growth and change. But also, sometimes I was really surprised about things that stayed the same that maybe I expected to change. It’s just really cool to be able to check back in with the student body.
ASHLEY WEI: Yeah, and to add on to Caroline, as I’ve mentioned before, we wanted to blend between old questions and new questions. Trying to figure out which old questions to keep and which we were going to remove was definitely difficult for us.
There was a lot of questions that we personally thought also were really exciting that we thought would be fun to ask again, but ultimately you only get so many questions. So, things we didn’t choose to keep were things like relationships in the fall. Although that was really interesting to ask about, it was less important to think about how that changed a few months later when we could have asked about other things, like we brought back questions on well-being from the fall.
Things move so fast here at NU, especially for first-years, and we thought it was really important to see if things have changed between the fall and the spring in terms of student well-being here at NU.
We also brought back questions from last spring, a year ago. Specifically, the entire (artificial intelligence) section has the same questions as last spring. AI is becoming increasingly important both in the job market, for student life, and I think it was evident that things have definitely changed from even just a year ago, and we were really excited to see the results.
To also brainstorm the new questions, we basically just sat down with a bunch of other Daily staffers and started to think about what questions we thought were interesting. We sort of approached it with just this mindset of, “What questions would we want to know?” or “What questions seem important to people that we know here at NU?” and just threw a bunch of ideas out there.
The section that I think I’m really excited about specifically is the sports section. Sports is a big part of campus. It’s a pretty important part of the college experience for some people, and I was really excited to see how engaged NU was.
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CYDNEY WATERMAN: Another thing that we had to consider was how we were going to get our responses. Our goal was to get as many responses as possible from people all across campus to make sure that our data was as representative (as possible). That’s why we used a bunch of different strategies like tabling outside of The Rock and (Technological Institute), posting on social media, sending it out in our group chats, asking Daily staffers to tap into their own networks, asking department heads to send it to students as well. In all, it was a hard process. Caroline did get rained on one of the days, but eventually we got there.
CAROLINE ALTSCHUL: I think one of the coolest parts of this entire process was crosstabs. So, we decided on crosstabs and then reported on those sections. “What is a crosstab?,” you might ask. A crosstab is essentially a statistical tool used to analyze the relationship between two or more categorical variables.
So, for example, that could be the relationship between area of study and feelings about the development of AI or even just screen time versus social satisfaction. And in terms of coming up with crosstabs that would be salient, we filtered the response code through many different crosstabs and then decided which were interesting.
So, what makes a crosstab interesting?We looked for numbers that really caught our eye. Sometimes those were really huge numbers, sometimes they were tiny numbers. Other times it was more about just the variance across categories or demographics that was really striking.
ASHLEY WEI: And after that whole process of coming up with questions to ask, reaching out to people, and going through this process of analyzing data, we’re really excited that we finally have our spring poll here.
We broke up our content into six different sections: well-being, artificial intelligence, sports, NU issues, politics and career, and our reporters did crosstabs and analyzed the data for all six of those sections. In addition to that, we have data visualizations that represent the respondents for each of the different questions that we ask in the poll.
Something else I’m really excited about is that we have a special section in the NU issues tab that’s specifically on student perspectives on the funding deal. NU struck a deal with the Trump administration near the end of last year, and it was definitely a big pivotal moment for this campus. And I was really excited to be able to highlight a lot of the student voices and what students really thought about this deal that was really, really impactful for our campus. And I’m really excited that we’re doing more multimedia collabs for this polling issue, and we have some really fun games coming in, so I’m really excited to see people play those as well.
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ASHLEY WEI: Thanks for listening to behind the scenes of NU in Bloom. This episode was reported by Ashley Wei, Cydney Waterman and Caroline Altschul and produced by Wallis Rogin.
The audio editor is Wallis Rogin. The multimedia managing editors are Ruby Dowling, Isabella Jacob and Matt Wasilewski. The editor-in-chief is Anavi Prakash. Follow us on X and Instagram @thedailynu.
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
Email: [email protected]
