Spears School of Business

A group of five Oklahoma State University master’s in business analytics students recently received the best analytics and visualization award at the 2020 Teradata Analytics Challenge competition.

 

The team of current students Sugandhi Akula and Soumya Patra, and recent OSU graduates Anamul Hasan, Pratyush Dash and Sreejita Biswas was recognized with the analytics and visualization award for their project on teenage dating violence.

 

“The team and I are elated about having won the best analytics and visualization award,” Akula said. “The pandemic turned the world upside down, but these trying times proved to us that perseverance is the secret of all triumphs. Everything going virtual did make it slightly difficult, at the beginning, taking classes online, attending meetings online, and even working online. Despite all these trials and tribulations, the team stayed motivated and passionate and made it happen.

 

“We also had a great support system, and an erudite advisor, Dr. C (Goutam Chakraborty), to help us through it all. The entire experience was enriching, and winning the award was the icing on the cake. Our victory has given us the incentive to work harder and consistently outdo ourselves.”

 

Patra said that the experience taught him so much as he looks forward to a career in business analytics.

 

“There were a lot of learnings in the three months we worked on the challenge,” he said. “It included identifying a problem based on available data and literature review, and also working efficiently as a team in a remote environment. Teamwork was one of the biggest aspects that I feel I have excelled in that will help me in a corporate working environment.

 

“Also, project management was another learning experience from working in the challenge. Our project included identifying data, creating a business problem which can be solved, performing various analysis, testing our approach and then deployment in a real-life scenario based on our recommendation. All the steps are the same in the corporate environment and the project helped me understand how to tackle problems that arise in every step of it and effectively resolve it as a team.”

 

In addition, the OSU team of Pankajdeer Bikumalla, Chad Dahlheimer, Raj Laxmi Prakash, Yash Prakash and Shelby Rangel received honorable mention recognition in the data challenge portion of the competition.

 

“I am very proud of the team winning the award as well as the team getting the honorable mention,” said Chakraborty, SAS Professor of Marketing Analytics and director of the Master in Business Analytics and Data Science program. “This is a tough field and our students proved once again that they can compete with the best teams in the world. Last year, we received an honorable mention and this year we have won the best visualization and data analytics award plus an honorable mention. This is testament of our students’ hard work and our faculty who prepare them to do well in such competitions.”

 

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