Student teams comprised of Consumer Insights and Analytics Program majors and Business Analytics majors excelled in national and state competitions at the end of the spring semester.
Two teams from the Consumer Insights and Analytics (CIA) program, a highly specialized cohort at LSBE, participated in the national Business Analytics Competition at Manhattan College (BAC@MC). The LSBE team of Ethan Bednarek, Nathan Hassett, Andrew Roles, and Joe Wilson, progressed to the final round of the competition and finished in the top 10. Another LSBE team of Megan Lauer, Emma Salmi, Daria Weinzierl, and Calais Williams also competed.
Roles shared, “The competition was an amazing experience. It served as a reinforcement that we actually knew what we were doing, and it showed that we have been able to retain and apply the various data skills at a higher level than we had thought. To be able to advance to the second round of the data competition reaffirms that more than anything else.”
The competition included 32 teams from 24 U.S. and U.K. universities. The competition objective was to analyze housing, rent, COVID, and supplemental data to make policy recommendations to improve life stability in the boroughs and sub-boroughs of New York City.
CIA Program Director Steve Sharkey stated, “This national-level analytics competition was a great opportunity for CIA students to apply the skills they have been learning in class to answer real-world-impacting questions. Our teams of UMD juniors demonstrated their knowledge and strength against teams of seniors at other institutions from across the country and the U.K.”
Additionally, three Business Analytics major teams participated in the MinneMUDAC Student Data Science Challenge. All three teams ranked in the top ten out of 38 total teams. The team of Donovan Bohn, Brodie Paulson, Kyle Sorenson, and Robby Wavrin took seventh place. And the teams of Evan Holm, Dan Monson, Wesley Norrgran, Cole Ofsthun, and Zack St. John and Austin Chaulkin, Tianle Duan, and Angie DuPont tied for eighth place.
The competition objective was to predict the NCAA March Madness basketball brackets and the eventual winner of NCAA tournament.
Warvin shared, “The experience we had in the competition was really fun because it allowed us to apply the analytics techniques that we had learned in the classroom to college basketball. It also made the games more exciting to watch! This experience was valuable because it showed us how powerful predictive analytics is and how it can be applied in a variety of ways.”
Student advisor and business analytics professor Dr. Nik Hassan stated, “The competition provides an excellent experience for students to test the knowledge learned from classes in a real-life interactive environment and to benchmark themselves against students from other universities.”