Spears School of Business

From left, Tejaswi Maruthi, Ayush Mohan, Lavada Blanton and Kaiser Cleburn teamed up to place third at the University of Iowa Business Analytics Case Competition.

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A group of Oklahoma State University business analytics students placed third out of 16 teams at the Business Analytics Case Competition hosted virtually April 8 by the University of Iowa.

 

Lavada Blanton, Kaiser Cleburn, Tejaswi Maruthi and Ayush Mohan, master’s students in the business analytics and data science program, represented OSU, and was one of four teams advancing to the finals, eventually earning the third-place finish and the $1,500 in prize money. Other finalists were the University of Washington (first place), Purdue University (second) and the University of Iowa (honorable mention).

 

“I enjoyed working with some talented people for a week on a project that will be much like my upcoming job,” Blanton said. “I was able to see some wonderful presentations and it was great to see our hard work pay off. We were also able to get great feedback from the judges.”

 

The University of Iowa competition provides teams the opportunity to practice being an analytics professional by using their programming, data wrangling, analysis, visualization and presentation skills in one competition. A judge’s panel comprised of experts from the event’s sponsor, Fastenal, and other analytics leaders from various industries selected the top teams.

 

“What made this competition different from others was that it required us to address a multitude of contrasting business problems,” Mohan said. “We decided to play to our strengths, which allowed us to tackle disparate issues while still working synergically. In the end, we managed to bring our different findings together nicely. It was fantastic to see how we were able to find ways to improve multiple components of the company’s business model using even limited data.”

 

Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, director of the Master’s in Business Analytics and Data Science program, was pleased with the third-place finish.

 

“I am very proud of our students who spent many hours coming up with the solution of a real-world problem through data analysis and visualization,” Chakraborty said. “This is the third time in a row our team placed among the top three spots in such a prestigious competition ahead of teams from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Iowa, Wake Forest University, University of Cincinnati and others. The credit goes to our hard-working students and our faculty who have prepared students over the course of the curriculum to excel in competitions against the best teams from around the country.”

 

For more information about the master’s in business analytics program at OSU, visit the website.