by Trey Plante ’24
This past semester I took Working with Remote Sensing Data (QAC234) and developed a project focused on counting container ships in the Long Beach Harbor, California. Here are some details of what I did.
Counting ships
student work
Wesleyan team takes first place in the regional Roland Berger’s Case for a Cause competition, follows in the footsteps of the win in 2018
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.
Art history in a digital way: network analysis of Davison Art Center collections
Many know that Wesleyan has a very large collection of prints dating back to the 15th century, stored in the Davison Art Center (DAC). Not many are aware that, through the efforts of the DAC staff, the collection comes with an extensive dataset containing metadata for all records. In the fall of 2017, students from the Introduction to Network Analysis (QAC 241) got a chance to view some of the famous prints and then search for new insights in art history using their quantitative skills. This post describes the experiences, accomplishments, and challenges of working with art history data.
Fun in the Sun: A Look at Summer QAC Projects
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.
Can we Utilize Passion in Data Science?
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.