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.

The Evariant Networking Event, conducted on 12th October, 2015, was a great way to network with analytics professionals and learn about today’s industry analytics. Evariant helps leading hospital networks make sense of big data, giving marketers and physician relationship teams actionable insights to drive volume and engagement. The experts from Evariant who presented and explained about big data analytics also included 2 Alumnis from MSBAPM Neeraj Nagendra and Sumit Jain. Other professionals working at Evariant were Sudha, Neil, and Basant.

The professionals from Evariant in the networking event revealed about the company’s background and its culture. There are more than 170 employees and the company is growing rapidly. Although the company has a very serious approach when it comes to their work, and they are dedicated to strive for best results for their clients, but at the same time, everyone have their part of fun in the company and enjoys their work with enormous extra-curricular activities and flexibility.

Professionals from Evariant explained about the best practices and different types of Propensity Models they use for better results and to reduce the cost of their clients. Neil, the Digital Media Expert expressed how propensity modeling is used in Marketing Analytics, how data is collected and displayed and how media is placed through different vendors and outlets on the internet.

SAS skills are more in demand than ever before. SAS is a software suite developed for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics. To handle the increasing reams of data that technology throws out with lightning speed you need a SAS specialist or two. Thanks to our very own SAS specialists in the MSBAPM program, Piyush Rohella and Dilip Naidu, who volunteered to share their knowledge and provide hands-on training in the software to students of MSBAPM.

The ‘Introduction to SAS’ workshop was conducted as two one and half hour sessions each. The workshop was conceptualized to provide hands-on to students on the SAS software and train them on basic commands of the Base SAS programming.  Agenda for session-1 was designed to introduce the following topics to students, namely, introduction to user interface of SAS interface; the import and export functions explaining delimiters, fixed widths, etc; exploratory procedures that include proc and data steps; merge and append procedures. The agenda for Session-2 was designed to cover procedures like proc means, proc tabulate, proc freq; univariate and multivariate analysis; and some statistical tests.

Students showed immense interest in the workshop. There was an overwhelming number of attendees for the first session, more than 70 enthusiastic students. We also had one student from the FRM department attending the workshop. The presenters shared data sets and code files with the students prior to the session. They conducted the workshop by covering syntax and commands to import, create and export data files, manipulate date, and label and format files. Dilip and Piyush conducted the presentation projecting the codes they were writing in SAS and students followed his lead. The session was a great start for everyone new to the software. Session-2 was a following up on session-1, lot of the students that attended session-1 attended the second session of the workshop. In the session-2, Piyush presented on performing data exploration and manipulation techniques using Base SAS. He taught the class syntax for exploring mean, median, quantiles of variables using proc means command, appending and merging procedures data sets and variables, writing SQL codes in SAS, and a few more SAS procedures. Dilip then taugh the class procedures to perform univariate and multivariate analysis, and touched upon the significance of different statistical tests and how they are performed on SAS.

Students thought it to be a great session and very informational. We conducted a survey to get opinions of attendees on how they would rate the workshop, how well it was organized, how much information they gained from the session, clarity and brevity of the presenter and what they would like to learn in a future session of the workshop. The responses we received were greatly positive. However, students responded that the workshop was somewhat short. We agree that workshops like these have to be conducted over a longer period and we will plan for it in the future. We encourage all the students of MSBAPM to actively engage and participate in sessions like these to expand their knowledge about subjects closely related to Big Data and Analytics.

By Tanya Wang  – September 27th

The Chinese Mid-Autumn festival. The 2015 Fall BAPM Chinese students got together and celebrated their first month survival into the new environment! In China, the festival is the time for families’ reunion, wishing the next year’s happiness, and watching the full moon. However, since these students are studying abroad, everyone was so excited to get to know other classmates through the dinner party and they became each other’s’ new family members!

Because of celebrating the traditional festival, they soon get to know each other and look forward to spending next two years together on their life journey!

By Heather McLarney and Matt Ruggeri – 08/31/2015

This workshop introduced basic US etiquette, culture, and soft skills using PowerPoint slides, real life examples, videos clips, student participation, and interactive exercises. During this workshop Heather touched upon US working culture, everyday communication, and dress code and work etiquettes. This workshop benefitted a lot of students to a great extent.