What attracted you to the DataFest event? And how long and in what capacity have you been involved?
I was from a company, Edmunds.com, that provided data to DataFest back in 2015. I was made aware of UCLA’s DataFest from my initial involvement and continued to be a mentor in the early years and then a data fest judge for the past 8 years. I’ve been involved with DataFestfor the past 10 years except for the Covid year of course.
Statistics and Data Science has been the fastest growing department at UCLA for several years, and DataFest has grown along with it. What factors have contributed to this and where do you see the field going in the future?
From 2015 to now, data fest has grown from 100 to 400 students. Many factors have contributed to the growth. The field of Data Science and the use of data to find insights have been popularized from the Netflix $1 million prize challenge to Harvard Business Review saying Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century. With high paying jobs and few people equipped to work those jobs has fueled the surge in students wanting to learn and work in data science, statistics and data.
Many universities now offer a degree in data science and attract new talent into the field. With the field becoming more competitive, more students are actively getting hands-on experience in hack-a-thons, data fests and internships. That’s the reason there has been a 400% increase in participants in data fest. Looking towards the future and with many ground-breaking advances in generative AI, I foresee the field of data science to go or is going through a second renaissance where students and practitioners will retool to work in parallel with their AI counterparts to be even more productive.
The trend is the speed of delivering new features and insights. You’ve seen companies laying off employees who don’t want to adapt to new AI tools fearing they’re automating their own jobs out of existence. AI is here and the new generation of graduates will work alongside AI to perform tasks quickly. I look forward to seeing how AI will affect the way students work in the DataFest event.
Why, especially now, is this event more important than ever?
Students learn the fundamentals of math, statistics and programming in a classroom setting. Many have never answered more ambiguous business questions using messy data. I have walked the floor of datafest and many students ask very basic questions such as how do I keep the leading zeros in this column, how to change this string to a date field in this csv file to work with or what do I do since this dataset is too big for my laptop? I’ll suggest putting this data in a database and using SQL to wrangle the data.
The students will ask what is SQL? Or, if the data is too big for your laptop, put the data in the cloud and work with it there. What is the cloud or AWS? These are important topics and skills to know that they don’t typically face in a classroom setting as textbook exercises give pre-processed pretty data to work with. Datafest gives them an opportunity to work with real-world company data to answer questions and hone in on their technical skills.
What is the most important thing you learned from DataFest?
Students learn quickly, try a lot of methods, may fail but can pivot which is how we all work in business. After I give constructive feedback, some students come up to me afterwards and ask how they could have done better. That shows initiatives and grit. Many students learned that they are resilient which I think it’s an important self-discovery.
What is one thing you would want future DataFest participants to know about the event?
As a hiring manager, I’ve seen many resumes from new graduates who have no substantial personal projects, no prior work or internship experience which puts them at a disadvantage for job placements. If someone wants experience answering an actual business question using real company data, the DataFest is a truly accessible way for anyone to get their hands dirty.
It’s not an internship. You don’t need to be interviewed. There is no grade – no pass or fail. You just need to show up and work on it. Participants often meet other students from other groups/departments and bounce ideas off of each other. You’ll learn a lot and get as much out of it as you put into it. What a great way to learn!
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