Description
Students from participating Connecticut and Massachusetts will work in small teams (3-5 students per team) to tackle a surprise, large, and complex dataset. After two days of intense data wrangling, analysis, and presentation design, each team is allowed a few minutes and no more than three slides to impress a panel of judges. Prizes are awarded to the teams who impress the judges most.
Purpose of the competition:
The event is part of a set of initiatives to strengthen quantitative reasoning and facilitate computational and data analysis work across the curriculum. It is designed to bring together current students, alumni and data analysis professionals as they work together in addressing real world problems that involve computational data work. The event also provides an opportunity for recruiters to connect with students interested and skilled in data analysis that may be candidates for internships, job openings etc.
Who will be participating?
Undergraduate students who are interest in statistics and data science from Wesleyan, Trinity, Connecticut College, Yale, and the University of Connecticut will be there. Others can be invited as well. Please email vnazzaro@wesleyan.edu if you or your school are interested.
If you want to know more …
Please visit the Datafest pages of the American Statistical Association web site and if you have the time you may want to visit the pages of a couple of past events. Datafest events have been very successful (see some “feedback”) in connecting people within the data science community. Undergraduate students do the work, but consultants who are graduate students, faculty, and industry professionals assist them. From a recruiting standpoint, it would be a great way to watch undergraduate students work under pressure in teams and to examine their thinking processes.