Welcome to Change Makers, our series highlighting customer stories and builders making an incredible impact with Airtable. Today’s Change Maker co-leads the Airtable EDUser Group, a space for any and all Airtable users in education.
At CSU Channel Islands Extended University, Jerilee Petralba (
Meet Jerilee, Digital Analyst/CRM Administrator
🖼️ Do you have a go-to creative outlet or way to unwind after a busy day?
My favorite creative outlets are graphic design and quilting. As an Art major, switching between digital and analog media came naturally to me. I started with traditional quilts, but instead of printing my digital illustrations, I now piece them together into art quilts. It's the blend of both worlds that helps me destress. I'm also a board member of my art quilt guild, Quilts on the Wall, which provides a sense of community.
👩🏽💻 What's your superpower at work?
I'm a strong collaborator, which is key in my role, but over the years, I've been told my real superpower is spotting potential pitfalls. I see where things might break down before they become issues, which helps me design scalable, sustainable workflows.
🤖 What's a small feature or automation that makes a big difference in your day-to-day?
I have a base that I log and track chat activity from our 24/7 support chatbot. We want to keep a human in the loop when dealing with AI, so I review conversations, improve prompts, and use Airtable for insights and analysis. Steps that took me 4 hours now take about 1 hour with AI's help. The addition of field agents and analysis has made a massive time savings, and it's mind-boggling!
🗯️ What advice would you give to someone just getting started with Airtable?
Take a process that you want to improve and start from the very beginning. You already know the outcome you want. Once you've identified the beginning and end, you now have to map out all the steps that come in between. Be open to changing your process and don't be afraid of change. You're now in a different system that automates all the tedious steps you're annoyed of doing. When everything is built, you'll always ask yourself, "Why didn't I do that sooner?" Even after years of using Airtable, when I improve my existing processes, I still ask myself the same question.
The Challenge & Airtable Solution
Before Airtable, CSU Channel Islands Extended University struggled with fragmented student data tracked across various systems, spreadsheets, and reports. Different team members maintained their own versions of the same information, creating bottlenecks and duplicate work. Manual tracking was time-consuming and made scaling difficult as enrollment grew and new programs were added.
Jerilee and her team transformed this scattered approach by building a centralized Student Profiles system in Airtable. What began as a simple active student database evolved into a multi-resource hub that now serves as a schedule predictor, profile dashboard, degree progress tracker, and general education advising tool.
"The power of Airtable is that it lets us see the big picture and analyze insights from our existing data that lives in various places, systems, spreadsheets, or reports," explains Jerilee.
The solution leverages automations, extensions (particularly Page Designer), scripting, and custom workflows. Jerilee partnered with subject matter experts to ensure they had input in the design, focusing first on graduate programs before adapting the build for undergraduate programs. “Most of my builds are collaborative since I work with subject matter experts to create workflows that address their needs,” she says “Simple, practical builds are key, and I introduce complexity only when users are comfortable maintaining the system.”
Airtable AI has become a crucial component of their system. The team actively uses Deep Match to eliminate multiple automations that previously searched for matching records in linked tables. They also query OMNI to extract relevant insights from their data, helping identify missing data points and improve their understanding of the student lifecycle.
📺 Want to see it in action? Check out these video captures Jerilee shared below:
The Results
The Student Profiles system has dramatically improved efficiency across departments. Before Airtable, generating program reports could take 10-30 minutes each time, with steps repeated whenever updates were needed. Now stakeholders access program-specific interfaces directly, eliminating duplicate work.
Scalability has been another significant benefit. While the initial graduate student profiles took seven months to develop, the team replicated and adapted them for undergraduate programs in just a few weeks. Adding new degree programs now requires only 20-30 hours of additional work.
"Airtable is so customizable, and it works with you as long as you know what direction you want to take," Jerilee notes.
The information about student trends or looking at any grouped information about students was only available with peoplesoft queries before and did not give them the ability to answer questions to know more about student trends and behaviors by program. In addition, even looking at student information for one student or one admit cohort was very labor and time intensive to look up all the factors of information for one student, or find a query that would work or ask for a new query. The student profile database changed that.
What's Next
The team plans to expand AI's role in their workflow, particularly for degree progress tracking. "One of our goals is to use AI to read and interpret our degree progress documents, replace the multitude of automations built to meet these needs, and replace them with Deep Match, document analysis, and field agents," says Jerilee.
As they add new programs, they're considering whether to continue their current build or start grouping related programs. They're also working to improve their update schedule to further reduce workload for team members.
"Long-term, we plan to automate our process with minimal manual intervention. Manual processes will never go away, but we hope updates will be augmented by AI. As we continue to grow, we are confident that Airtable will meet our needs."
Copy & Paste AI Prompt
Here is Jerilee’s prompt for Deep Match implementation:
Analyze the following student records and identify matching profiles across our degree program tables based on name, email, and student ID. Flag any potential duplicates or inconsistencies in the data.
Did this use case inspire you? Drop a comment below if you try Deep Matching like Jerilee in your apps, and share how you’re using Airtable to change the way you work for a chance to be our next Change Maker spotlight!