After 2-days and approximately 36 hours of intense data wrangling, analysis, and presentation design. My team and I (Team Beta than U) won an Overall Best in Show Award at the 5 College DataFest! We were 1 out of 3 teams to receive this award out of the 30 teams that participated. Props to my awesome teammates for making this a very valuable learning experience!

What I've Learn From This Entire Experience:

Friday, March 31st

  • 6:30 pm: Doors open
  • 7:30 pm: Welcome and Orientation session and the reveal of the data set (ISB 135)
  • 8:15 pm: Workshop 1
  • 9:00 pm: Dinner
  • 9:15 pm: Workshop 2
  • midnight: DataFest closes its doors for the night.

Arrive early and spend this time to either talk with your team members or scouting for the perfect location. If you’re experienced in R Programming, these Workshop are a waste of time. However, if you’re new to R and have never use ggplot or dyplr; I highly recommend that you attend these workshops. Overall, you should spend this time downloading the dataset as fast as possible. The first person to get the dataset should start the data wrangling (cleaning, preparation, and manipulation). The other members should focus on looking at the variables. Talk about biases, what’s important, and how can you build a story from this data. When that’s all set and done, get some rest and come early because tomorrow is going to be a long day.

Saturday, April 1st

  • 8:00 am: Doors re-open
  • 9:30 am: Continental Breakfast
  • 11:00 am: Workshop 3
  • 12:30 pm: Lunch
  • 1:00 pm: Workshop 4
  • 2:00 pm: Workshop 5
  • 4 pm: Tea/Coffee and Cookies
  • 7 pm: DataFest Dinner
  • midnight: DataFest closes its doors for the night.

At this point in time you should be finished with your data wrangling and have several story ideas listed. If you don’t have it done by this time try to wrap it up before 12pm. Now the remainder of your time should be spent on statistics and building models. If that’s too complex have your team build visualizations, by night time you should come together and pick what the team thinks is the best topic to present. Now you guys should start a draft of your write-up and presentation. Again, the workshop are kind of useless if you’re experienced. There’s alot of information to digest in a short time period. Although, if you never experience these R packages always go check it out.

Sunday, April 2nd

  • 8:00 am: Doors re-open
  • 10:30 am: Brunch
  • 1 pm: Submissions due
  • 2 pm: Presentations and judging begin
  • 4 pm: Winners Showcase & Awards (ISB 135)
  • 4:45 pm: DataFest concludes

Today is crunch time! You guys have only a couple hours before submission is due. Make sure your slides and writeup are ready, also make a script since the presentation or being able to land on your toes is key for winning Datafest. Once submitted, have your team practice the script. It’s important that you guys how it down to 5 minutes! Overall, enjoy yourselves and be humble while presenting. Prepare to have judges break down your data analysis and techniques. Anyways, I hope you guys learn something from my team’s experience at Datafest since we wasted way too much time at the beginning.