This past week marks the completion of Summit’s second annual involvement in the Computational Modeling and Data Analytics (CMDA) capstone project at Virginia Tech. The CMDA capstone project allows students to partner with members of the data science industry and work through real-world problems over the course of a semester.
During last year’s project, Summit sponsored a team of CMDA students to support the development of a financial Reestimate Analysis Tool. These students helped design an online application that allows the user to input their own data and understand year-over-year changes in financial reestimates. For this year’s project, the “Who CARES?” team helped Summit analyze the financial impact of the CARES Act on institutions for higher education. Virginia Tech students used web-scraping techniques to design a database of higher-education data. The students wrote code using R and Python packages to scrape data from sites including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System and the Federal Student Aid program. Summit will use this data to create a predictive model to better understand how colleges and universities were impacted by the CARES Act as well as how the federal government should respond moving forward.
We would like to thank the students and staff at Virginia Tech for once again allowing us to be part of such a fulfilling program. We are thrilled to support the students and help develop them for careers in data science.
