Four sophomores from Wesleyan – Asa Sakornpant, Pim Wandee, Sarah Rizky Ardhani, and Ransho Ueno – won the New England regional competition in business consulting, hosted by the Boston office of Roland Berger. Read on for their thoughts on what makes a successful team, which parts of Wesleyan experience have helped them, and where do they see themselves in the future.
“Consulting is a career where — these companies, what they offer is their people; their people are their product,” said Simon Chen ‘15, who during his time at Wesleyan was an Econ and East Asian studies double major, and is now an IBM consultant. “It’s not like they’re trying to sell iPhones, or sell computers … Read more
It’s bizarre to go to a university where it’s practically a given that your classmates will your mind when they tell you about their summer. This could be daunting, as not all of us have the resources for a big internship or trip around the world. However, you don’t need to travel to have a story worth sharing, a fact that seventeen Wesleyan students took advantage of this summer. The QAC’s Summer Apprenticeship is a program in which students partner with a faculty mentor to work on a data-based research project. I spoke to a couple of participants and asked them to tell me about their work.
With data science languages, sometimes learning the basics can be the hardest part. The QAC offers several .25 credit classes that introduce students to the necessities of different languages, but even fitting all the necessary information into a half a semester can be difficult. This past quarter, Professor Pavel Oleinikov utilized a website called DataCamp to help his students get comfortable with the basics of Python. DataCamp is an online collection of data science lessons that teaches users through videos and repetitive exercises. The website has an in-browser code box that allows users to code right on the website without having to download any software. Each lesson takes roughly 30 minutes to 1 hour to complete, making it a convenient way to nail down a specific skill.
It can be easy to think of data science as cut and dry analysis consisting solely of numbers. But according to Economics major Leah Giacalone ’17, if people think of it that way it’s just because they haven’t tried it yet. “Personally, I’ve always found being able to code super exciting,” she said. “The first time I wrote code and then it worked was the most exciting thing ever. I always tell people that and they don’t believe me.”
If you are someone who doesn’t believe in the passion underlying data science, then maybe it’s time to give it a go, because an increasing number of companies are utilizing passion as a power source for their problems. An example of this is Kaggle, a website founded in 2010 that allows companies to post their data and research problems online so that people from around the world can compete to create the best solution. Kaggle is using the overflow of big data to its advantage to create a sort of Kickstarter for data science. It’s engaging, fresh, and possibly a good way for data analysis hopefuls to break the ice with coding.
