Spears School of Business

A new team of business analytics graduate students led Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business to its second consecutive championship in the Data4Good Competition.

 

Kazi Ahmed, Siddharth Birajdar, Chinmay Deshpande and Dheerusha Tiwari collaborated for the win in early February on the Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School’s Washington, D.C., campus.

 

The first-year Master’s in Business Analytics and Data Science (MS BAnDS) students secured the top prize of $5,000 in the graduate division finals after qualifying with a regional victory. 

 

“Winning this championship with my teammates means far more than just earning a title,” Tiwari said. “It honestly feels like continuing a legacy. Our seniors had won this competition before us, and we felt a deep sense of responsibility to carry that standard forward and represent OSU with the same excellence.”

 

MS BAnDS students Srikaran Anand, Edgar Castillo Garza, Bennett Frohock and Josias Hernandez Perez won the previous Data4Good national championship in November 2024 at Purdue University.

 

Students in undergraduate and master’s degree programs across the United States and Canada were eligible to win the 2025-26 competition, and OSU repeated as the graduate division champion. 

 

“This is a great achievement by our first-year MS BAnDS students,” said Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, MS BAnDS program director. “This is the second time in a row BAnDS students have won first place in this prestigious competition. It is a testament of the hard work of students and our faculty who teach them.”

 

Participants engaged in webinars, training sessions and a case challenge, which tested their abilities to tackle a real-world problem using data analytics. Dr. Sarah Chabinak, manager in the Watson Graduate School of Management, accompanied the MS BAnDS students as their advisor. 

 

“It was a great competition,” Chabinak said. “The organizers and judges were very impressed with the work our students did and their exceptional presentation skills. Their focus on the business problem/applications and their demo elevated them above the competition.”

 

The MS BAnDS program is ranked No. 2 in the nation among master’s in data science programs, trailing only Harvard University, according to Fortune.com. Over the fall 2025 semester, MS BAnDS students won the Broadband Equity Challenge, the Alpha Ramos Hackathon and Disney Data and Analytics Women awards.

 

The Data4Good champions benefit from their graduate program’s success while enriching it.

 

“It is rare to find a program that provides such strong backing for extracurricular success, and that encouragement made all the difference,” Deshpande said. “The experience taught me that while technical skills are just the baseline, the real impact comes from the ‘art’ of business communication and interpretability. I now have a much clearer perspective on the importance of looking at problems from a wider lens.”

 

Visit the website to learn more about OSU’s award-winning MS BAnDS program, a STEM program that offers students practical data analysis experience by applying knowledge acquired in classrooms to solving real-world business problems.