An interdisciplinary team of Elon students presented a data analysis during the Business Analytics Competition at Manhattan College.
A team of Elon University students won the poster category of the 2018 Business Analytics Competition hosted by the Manhattan College School of Business.
Noah Brown ’19 (economics), Aidan Draper ’19 (computer science), Jack Redpath ’19 (computer science) and Angeline Sanders ’18 (statistics), under the mentorship of Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems Mostafa Mesgari, analyzed and gathered business insight from a competition-specific dataset. They presented a poster summarizing their analysis to a panel of judges.
“One of the main things that challenged us, but also allowed us to succeed, was the fact that we all came from different backgrounds,” Sanders said. “Almost all of the other teams were composed of business majors, but we brought mathematics, statistics, computer science and business to the table.”
The Business Analytics Competition brought together 18 teams from schools in Europe, Canada and across the U.S., including the University of San Francisco, Pace University and University of Waterloo. Teams engaged in the art and science of decision-making and had the opportunity to network with professionals. They also attended keynote sessions featuring world-renowned data scientist Drew Conway and I Quant NY founder Ben Wellington.
“The competition was highly beneficial in cultivating analytical capabilities as a team, as well as developing our individual analytical expertise,” Brown said.
The team was sponsored by the Center for Organizational Analytics, and enjoyed support from HanesBrands Inc. and several faculty members from various departments on campus.
This was Elon’s first time participating in the Business Analytics Competition.
Last fall, the team of Brown, Draper and Redpath won the Elon Champion Analytics Competition, which involved data analysis, text mining and predictive modeling for a real business case from HanesBrands.