On Tuesday, April 5^th UCONN School of Business Toastmasters club facilitated a Charter Ceremony at the GBLC, 2nd Floor Observation Deck. This ceremony marked the official recognition of the club by UCONN and International Toastmasters Community.

Apart from toastmasters, students and faculty members from MSBAPM, FRM and MBA were also invited along with their families and friends.

The President of the Toastmasters Club, Suresh, commenced the meeting by welcoming the guests followed by the club sponsors, Heather McLarney and Ahren Niles extending invitations to Prof. Jose Cruz, Prof. Ram Gopal and Anna. They conveyed their best wishes to the club and emphasized the importance of such a club and appreciated the potential benefit this club could provide to the student community of UCONN.

The club mentors assigned to this club are Steve Burgess and Rick Kominowksi . Beth Langdon,  a Division Director and Sharon Mercado,  a District Director played instrumental roles in formulating this club. The meeting was followed by the charter presentation ceremony where the Club Charter was presented to the Club Officers.

The leadership team of the Toastmasters Club comprises of the following members, Suresh Shanmugham [President], Shyma Nair [Vice President Education], Haardik Sharma [Vice President Public Relations], Sudeepta Chandel [Vice President Membership], Sunny Dalsania [Secretary], Michael Luo [Treasurer], Samiresh Udutha [Sergeant at Arms], Mahesh Pai [Sergeant at Arms].

Till date, there are 30+ toastmasters enrolled with the club. The Toastmasters Club at UConn aims at building confident public speakers and strong leaders. The Club provides a supportive, learn by practice environment which helps students strengthen their communication skills, overcome stage fear and an overall personality development.

If you have stage fear, then the TM Club is unequivocally, the best antidote. It is a superb platform to learn, practice and experience power of communication.

The Toastmasters club operates every Thursday from 4.30 PM to 5.30 PM.

Interested students can contact Haardik Sharma (2019937846), to enjoy a free guest session of Toastmasters Meeting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The MSBAPM Graduation Ceremony was held at the Observation Deck in GBLC on May 2nd, 2016 for the students graduating in May. This event was held to congratulate the graduates and bid goodbye to them as they enter a new phase of their professional life. The MSBAPM family gave the students an overwhelming farewell wishing them success as they embark upon their new journey. MSBAPM is a close knit family with alumni visiting often, attending events and sharing their experiences with the new students. Here are a few glimpses of the wonderful evening.

   

   

   

    

     

Sunday, April 24, 2016 MSBAPM club witnessed one of the most awaited events of the year. The golf outing was a quick getaway for faculty, students and alumni’s to get out their routine ,out in the sun to enjoy golf. It was held at Goldwin Park at 9 am for optional lessons followed by tee-time and delicious lunch. The lessons taught the beginners well and the professionals very It was an excellent event for networking with alumni’s for current students and also, faculty interaction with students led them know each other better outside class. How fortunate we are, while there are many around the country digging their vehicles out of snow drifts. At MSBAPM, we interact differently!

                   

                 

The workshop on Predictive Modelling Basics was conducted on 19^th April, 2016 by Akhil Bhat.

The workshop stressed on topics like Correlations, Linear Regression and Modifications to linear regression.The discussion started off with the definition of correlation and the misconceptions around the same. Akhil gave the students a comprehensive understanding of the various assumptions of linear regression and the diagnostics one must look into to make sure results are right and interpreted correctly. He also spoke about the required modifications if the relationship between dependent and independent variables is not linear, interpretation of results and various definitions associated with linear regression.

This session came across as a useful one for students without prior experience in Predictive Analytics. Fundamental topics were given more importance so as to provide a strong foundation in Modelling for the MSBAPM students.

This workshop on Excel was conducted on April 5^th, 2016 by  Harshini Mohan, a Fall 2015 MSBAPM Student.

This workshop gave a good insight on some of the unique features of Excel like the Power View, Power Pivots and Power Maps.

Harshini Mohan distributed a data set to all the attendees of the workshop and asked them to play with the data to bring out their own visualizations. Then she explained the usefulness of the Power View feature of Excel to explore, visualize and present data. Along with the Power View, she also highlighted the importance of the Power Pivot Excel add-in which is used to perform powerful data analysis and create sophisticated data models.

The most exciting topic of this workshop was the 3D data visualization tool in Excel called the Power Map. Visualizing geographical and temporal data, analyzing data in 3D was demonstrated using this tool.

On the whole the workshop was a huge success making the attendees want to explore more about the unique features in Excel.

 

Importance of the Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year, also known as Spring Festival in China, is China’s most important traditional festival. It is a time for families to get together. The New Year’s Eve dinner is called “reunion dinner”, and is believed to be the most important meal of the year. Big families of several generations sit around tables and enjoy the food and time together.

The Chinese New Year celebrates a year of hard work, is a time to relax with family and wish for a prosperous year ahead. Each Chinese zodiac year begins on Chinese New Year’s Day. 2016 is the year of the Monkey!

   

 

Chinese Spring 2016 Festival at UConn!

The Chinese New Year was celebrated at UConn with great enthusiasm on February 26th, 2016. Needless to say, the event was a big hit! Multiple fun activities along with the mouth-watering Chinese food contributed to the event becoming a huge success.

The Chinese Spring event was hosted by our talented students, Julie Shih, Yen-Chen Wang (Janice) and Piyush Rohella. The other students of the organizing committee who worked hard to make this event a huge success were Guanwei Tao (Rachel), Xuewei Feng (Sylvia), Xin Ni (Amy), Jie Sheng (Crystal), Liuliu Zhou, Jun Sun, Fu-Ti Hsu (Shifty) and Zhong He (Verse).

Here are some glimpses of the UConn Family enjoying the event.

     

 

     

 

     

Activities

Activities like Chinese Trivia test, Paper cutting competition, Singing the popular Chinese song “I miss you”, the Hot Potato Game and Lottery involved active participation from the crowd and was highly entertaining.

The event ended on a good note with dance performances by the Chinese and Indian students as well as by Professor Jose Cruz.

     

 

     

 

 

 

The workshop on Advanced Python was conducted on Dec 7, 2015 and Dec 9, 2015 in two phases by Nikhil Mishra and Ashwin Ramanathan. The first day of the workshop covered topics such as how Python evolved to become a mainstream language for data analytics and text analytics in particular. The workshop started with basics like downloading and setting up Python and then progressed towards providing examples in social media, natural language processing and other sectors which gave students some context on how Python could be used and of its growing significance in industry. Sentiment analysis using Twitter API’s was demonstrated during the workshop which resonated well with students.

The second day of the workshop covered concepts such as regular expressions, pandas and how to use Python to frame rules for text mining using Simple Grammar. Other concepts like Machine learning were also touched upon during the workshop. The two-day workshop was a great learning experience to students beginning to learn Python and also for those with previous experience.

 

 

The Graduation Ceremony held on December 4th, 2015 was a wonderful farewell dinner for the students graduating in December. MSBAPM wanted to give an overwhelming goodbye to the students who have been a part of MSBAPM family and we wish them huge success in their professional life. The graduate students are always welcome to come, attend events and keep us updated and we love to hear from them. Some glances of the MSBAPM Graduation Ceremony.

                              

The Workshop on Apache Spark was conducted on Wednesday, December 2^nd, by Vinay Vaddiparthi, as a one and half hour session. The agenda for the workshop was to cover an overview, brief history and applications of Apache Spark. Vinay was also to cover MapReduce algorithm, RDDs, Transformations & Actions and a use case for Apache Spark.

Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing framework, originally developed in the AMPLab at University of California, Berkley. It is a fast, general purpose computational engine for large-scale data processing. It is written is Scala, a functional programming language. There are many advantages to using Apache Spark over Hadoop’s MapReduce paradigm. It is ten to hundred times faster than MapReduce on memory, it runs on powerful Scala, Python, Java and R APIs, and it brings the processing to data rather than the data to processing.

Vinay then gave an overview of the Spark stack and explained the contrast between the use of MapReduce and Apache Spark. He then explained the concept of Resilient Distributed Datasets, their creation and use, and use of transformations and actions. Vinay demonstrated a use case in python on Apache Spark and its installation. At the end of the workshop he provided links to MOOCs with learning and practice material for Apache Spark.

    

Corporate Technologies info-session was held on December 1, 2015 and the experts spoke about the company, culture and full time opportunity at Corporate Technologies. The company currently have opportunities for Analysts and Consultants.  It was an insightful session to learn about the technologies that they work with and some of which are Tableau, Qlikview and Informatica. Their client base is in finance and pharma industries majorly. Students came to know how can they rise up the ladder from analyst to consultant working with Corporate Technologies.