Sixteen MTSU students competed in a 24-hour data challenge from Friday to Saturday afternoon in the Business and Aerospace building, attempting to solve a complex business question, hosted by the Data Science and Economics Clubs.
At the inaugural Call of Data analytics challenge, the students divided into four teams and considered economic costs, risks, resilience and scalability — among other factors — to determine the best city for Cooper Steel, a family-owned company in Shelbyville, Tennessee, to expand to.
“They are a $1 million company, so they’re quite large,” Stuart Fowler, chair of MTSU’s economics and finance department, said. “They have asked us to help them with this problem, and this problem is where and how should Cooper Steel build or acquire its next fabrication facility.”
The competition gave students 24 hours to work on this project beginning at 3 p.m. on Friday. Each team presented its findings to a panel of judges at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
The teams chose three metropolitan cities across the United States and ranked them based on the information they analyzed. Teams examined the pros and cons of each city, including labor markets, incentives/costs and proximity to suppliers and clients, as per the instructions.
Kendahl Franklin, Kris Patel, Masha Bystntsku and Sayori Shreshta — Team Two — won the tournament. Second place went to Victoria Voronkina-Yitzchaki, Sreehari Sreejith and Bennie McTier.
Rakesh Chaudhary, from Team Three, discussed his group’s presentation.
“The anxiety that we had before performing, that’s gone, because we have kind of a good estimate of where we’re going to be,” Chaudhary said. “Some other things, I kind of felt that in our presentation, we could have done better. So definitely getting some self-feedback, I would say. But overall, pretty good experience, great event.”
The 24-hour challenge prepared students for the national competition at the University of Kentucky, which is scheduled for the spring, according to Fowler.”
“The Economic Games are in the spring, and they’ve asked to go, but they also wanted practice,” Fowler said. “They wanted to see if they could do something similar, and so we’ve, with the Econ Club and the Data Science Club, they created this challenge in a way to practice for this big national competition in the spring.”
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