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.

Importance of Diwali and how is it celebrated

One of the most significant festivals in Indian culture visible from space, Diwali, is the festival of lights, with millions of firework displays and celebrations across the world. The festive mood in the air during Diwali makes everyone happy. Diwali, in some Indian languages, translates literally as “row of lamps” and is a celebration of the victory of good over evil, light over dark and knowledge over ignorance.

Diwali at UConn School of Business

Diwali was celebrated with great joy and enthusiasm on November 13th, 2015 by UConn School of Business family. The banquet hall was  illuminated with lamps and candle-sticks. A great assortments of Indian cuisines and desserts were served for dinner.

Performances

Diwali event was hosted by our amazing talented students Alekhya Garlapati, Mahesh Pai and Piyush Rohella. The celebration started with amazing flute performance by Chinmay Joshi, followed by a guitar performance by Alok Singh. Students were extremely enthusiastic and couldn’t stop cheering up the performances. A graceful and festive dance performance by UConn girls namely Abhinaya Raju, Gargi Chugh, Paridhi Valecha, Sowmya Subramanian and Swati Chelawat was followed by an amazing dance performance by UConn Boys Dinesh Takkallapelly, Kirubhakaran Gnanabalan, Nirmal Chandrasingh and Sunny Dalsania on fun and festive songs. Maithili Pandey sang a beautiful melodious song, and then was the time to move to a hilarious stand-up comedy performance by Sainath Palla, which was followed by a fun-filled group dance performance by Abhinaya Raju, Dinesh Takkallapelly, Gargi Chugh, Harsh Bansal, Mrigank Tayal, Nikita Bonavate, Paridhi Valecha, Piyush Rohella, Sowmya Subramanian and Vipin Yadav

Glimpses of Diwali Celebration 2015

Everyone was dressed in beautiful traditional attires and festivity was all over in the air. Students and faculties played a hilarious networking game called “Star of the night”, where one star was distributed to everyone. People ask questions and if you say no, you give up your star and the person with maximum stars at the end of the event wins the game. Here are some beautiful glimpses of the festival and UConn School of Business family.

Workshop on R was conducted by Sasank Daggubati on 4^th and 11^th of November. The first session of the workshop was an introductory session on R as a platform for statistical computing, its popularity and wide industry use. Sasank had the students install the R interface and demonstrated some simple codes and statistics. He demonstrated the use of packages, vectors, matrices, arrays and data frames.

The second session of the workshop on R was designed to demonstrate use cases for advanced analytics in R. It provided hands-on on more complex codes to perform data manipulation, sampling, create models and predict values. Sasank then demonstrated the use of R sentiment package for scoring of Twitter feeds into positive, negative or neutral polarities, for user defined searches. It was interesting to see the wide usage of R in analytics and how versatile it is. Sasank gave a number of tips and tricks for working with R, and a few examples of interview questions.

A bustling crowd, nervous laughter and a room full of enthusiastic students, dressed in neat formal attire, waited outside the closed doors of the career fair, held at Marriott in Downtown Hartford at 2:00 pm on the 23rd October 2015. The doors opened and the students rushed in, ready to encounter what they had been anxiously awaiting. The students we equipped with their portfolios and resumes to impress the companies’ HRs and representatives.

The UConn Graduate Career Fair was primarily held for part- time and full-time MBA, MSBAPM and FRM students in their first and second years. Some looking for summer internships and some for full time jobs, the hall was a scurry of students all eagerly anticipating the outcome at each of the stalls.

The fair offered a wide range of companies (25 in number), some of which were – Priceline, Boeing, Aetna, Eversource, ConnectiCare, Target, CVS Health, Cigna and many more. We had the opportunity to talk to a variety of companies, make decisions on what profiles we would like to work as and distribute resumes to the companies we were interested in. It helped us realize the number of opportunities that were present before us. It created a platform for networking, to improvise our conversational skills, collect information regarding an array of companies depending on our area of interest and a chance to meet people who worked in important functions in the company of our interest.

The representatives were patient with their advice and distribution of critical information regarding their companies. Many of whom were surprised at the quality and number of the students who had attended the fair. The Graduate Career Fair was a well-rounded exposure for each student who was present there.

By Peter Liu and Parth Kulkarni – 10/21/2015

SQL (Structured Query Language) is everywhere, and in today’s digitized world with massive amounts of data being gathered every day and stored into a database, knowing how to program with SQL is imperative. Whether you’re a data analyst or a management student, SQL is a great language to learn.

The Workshop on SQL was conducted by Parth Kulkarni and Peter Liu. Both Parth and Peter are BAPM students that joined the program in Fall 2014. Parth and Peter did their summer internship at Ebay in California. They worked on SQL during their internship and thought it would be useful to the current students if they shared their experience and knowledge with them. This workshop was conceptualized to give students a thorough understanding of how SQL is being used across industries on a day to day basis. It will also cover typical SQL use cases (calculating conversion rate, moving average, customer lifetime value (CLV), RFM (recency, frequency, monetization) etc.

The workshop was designed assuming that students have a prior working knowledge on relational databases, typical DML commands (Select statement), usage of groupings and aggregate functions and understanding of SQL joins.

Parth conducted the first hour of the workshop wherein he covered all the basic concepts and syntax of SQL that are most widely used. For instance, create, update, drop, delete, select, etc. He explained how to use write queries incorporating where, group by, having, and order by clauses. He touched upon the different types of joins, subqueries – their two types and derived tables. Through the session, Parth provided examples of common interview questions related to the topics. The next half hour of the workshop was taken by Peter, where he explained with examples of queries web analytics that he did for Ebay as part of his internship. It was interesting to see how much of analytics can be done using SQL. The workshop session was very engaging. Once again, the survey responses we received for the workshop were very positive. The workshop was organized and content was presented clearly. It  was a refresher for those with basic knowledge of SQL.

The Workshop on Advance Excel was conducted by Aarthi Vemuri on 14th October, 2015. Aarthi joined the MSBAPM program in Fall 2014. Since then, she has actively volunteered to host workshops and tutoring sessions on Excel. This workshop was conceptualized to give an overview on how to use excel for eyeballing data without using complex statistical tools.

Aarthi began the workshop by sharing with the class some data files to use through the session. She demonstrated how a large data set could be converted into a table and quick calculations like sum of column, minimum value, maximum value, etc., for every column can be obtained by selecting from a dropdown menu. She then went on to demonstrate functions and formulae to perform data cleaning and text mining on a text data. Then the class learnt about pivot tables and how they can be used to create dashboards. Aarthi created some pivot tables, charts, filters for charts and themes for the worksheet to make it look like a dashboard. The dashboard looked quite impressive, it was on par with something we would create on Tableau. Lastly, she talked about PowerPivot add-in and how it more powerful than regular excel. PowerPivot can go over the limit of one million rows, it can connect to any database to retrieve data and does simplified and speedy calculations.

It was a brief workshop, it lasted for an hour. However, many useful techniques and functions were demonstrated. Students were inspired to explore the topics further. Feedback received from the students for the session was that it was well organized, lot of information that they needed was covered, and that the content presented at the workshop was helpful.