DATA SCIENCE PREMIUM PROJECT 2019

Dear all who have followed our journey,

over the past five months, everybody that has participated in Premium has been on a journey. Sometimes it was tough, not knowing what the client really wants or what the team wants, but in the end, we all have managed to deliver something more or less tangible and can be proud of, of what we have done.

For us this means the following:

We have...

- Ran a social media awareness campaign to highlight women’s accomplishments in STEM and science, this was displayed not only here on Tumblr, but also on the screens of the UM.

- Applied for and won a diversity grant of the University of 7.000€ to enhance women’s ability to create a social network and increase the visibility of their accomplishments in the Data Science field. 

- Created and completed a kids workshop that we successfully had 36 kids participate in, to engage and interest more young girls in the field of Data Science.

- interviewed seven women in the Data Science field, pointed out improvement areas for the Institue of Data Science at UM and the entire university. Through this, we also advised the IDS on how a Mentoring program for women could look like.

Overall, we are very happy with how the project turned out. We are very proud that we have seen everything we set out to do, trough.

We hope you had an interesting and educational journey as we had.

All the best to all of you and we will see you all tomorrow!

Our final project has been completed. We have held the Kids Workshop which was one of two main goals we were given from our client. It was a full-on success as 23 out 30 students gave us the feedback that they will try Scratch at home by themselves! And most importantly more girls than boys said that they will try it out once more!

However, we did realize that the presentation and the introduction to Scratch should definitely be done in Dutch if the students are Dutch too! Nevertheless, we believe that we have brought this last task to a successful end. We thoroughly enjoyed creating a session that allows children to explore and find their interest in coding and the field of Data Science.

We are honored to be nominated for the category “most memorable message”, even though we think we also have an amazing team dynamic ;). We wish all the other nominees and all the other teams good luck and may the odds be in your favor!

Our report is coming along nicely, and the second draft (three in total) should be done by today! We can’t wait to share it with you! So far we have 25 pages of pure text.

Have you seen the newest report about female employment in Europe?

As part of the program “Master yourself” organised by the university, David had the opportunity to attend the last workshop of this program on Diversity on the Workfloor. This workshop was held by the university’s own diversity office. 3 hours we had open and lively discussions about the topic of diversity, women at work and also all the different initiatives and the steps the university is already taking in these areas! The four identified areas for the university are

1. Attracting and retaining talent,

2. Fostering cultural change,

3. Making lifephase-friendly HR policies,

4. Strengtehning diversity competencies.

It was super interesting to see the different initiatives that are highlighted in this workshop and their implementation at the university. Beautiful to see that so much is being done to empower diversity and making the university international and open, so actually standing behind what they claim to be. But even here it became relevant again that there are things being done but that certain areas still need support. And not just from the diversity office, but from all of us. One of their latest achievements is changing the university flag. Have you seen it yet? It now proudly holds all the university colors but in a rainbow formation.

This Friday we had a first practice run of our children workshop with 6 Dutch school children. In this workshop we teach young children aged 9-12 years-old how to code with a simple drag & drop game program called Scratch. Using already existing instruction cards we let the children with our help explore how to create their own little video game. In this case it is a game in which you hold up a ball-like-object with a paddle. But don’t let it drop or you lose! It was a fun interactive one hour session. As every kid can choose a variety of balls and paddles the final product can be whatever they want it to be! This way you end up with a game thats just normal and then others that have a donut balancing an egg!

Another Wednesday, another meeting! We read through all our interviews, made notes, discussed and cooperated as a team should! As a special treat instead of honkering down in one of the small rooms at Tapijn we decided to do an outside meeting. Fresh air and the sun shine did wonders to our productivity. The two hour meeting stayed a two hour meeting and didn’t extend longer than that.

We are now on the final stretch towards our final report. We have now analyzed our collected data from 7 interviews. Now what is left is to write everything up and put it neetly together. As we have a very involved client our report will first go through multiple draft versions before we can share with you all.

We wish all the other teams a great last month! Let it be succesful!

As has become kind of a tradition, once more we met as a team on Wednesday evening to talk business! ... well, usually those session are made up of talking for 1 hour about everything in the world, the last topic was how democracy isn’t at its complete form and that Aristotle had different views on this topic (I know very interesting!). And then after packing our bellies full of in this case pizza, we return to the topic at hand. This time we made a further plan on our key deliveries that we want to do until the 29th May. Which is already in one month! Therefore we have split up the parts of the report and are hoping to submit a first draft already by the 6th May! Let’s see how that works out. We will keep you updated.

We hope you all enjoyed your Easter break! 

Right before we enjoyed some days off we had our team dynamics meeting. This session was very helpful as we were able to talk through some aspects that we still either need to work on and how we feel we have done as a team all together. It is quite difficult to admit to points of improvement as we all want to portray ourselves as a great team, especially here on tumblr. With the help of our coaches we were were able to write down the plus and minuses, the points of improvements but also to pat ourselves on the back for what we have done so far. We do believe that we as a team are open in our communication and are helping each other wherever we can but we want to stand more firmly as a team in communicating to our client what we can and cannot do. 

After having been offline for a week due to exam week our group rejoined forces yesterday evening for a dinner meeting. Over a plate of tasty spaghetti and tomato sauce, we put our heads together and tried to pick up where we left off.

This Monday we had a meeting with our client because not everything goes well all the time. We had to discuss a slight communication problem that we overcame by being honest and straight forward with each other. It is important to keep the client happy but that doesn’t mean that our voice doesn’t count. But our honest conversation helped us resolve the issue.

Then, with our client together we planned ahead and realized the following:

1. We need to double down on our interviews. Really ask tough questions to get the most out of the participants.

2. We should look to recruit more participants, maybe even from SBE to get a better feeling of how the topic of women empowerment is handled at other faculties.

3. The Scratch workshop got a deadline for the 20th April, and by this Sunday we want our first literature summary to be readable for our mentor and client.

What a week! I myself found myself still on vacation in Italy when I received an email on Monday morning which asked our Premium group to hold a 40-minute presentation on Thursday that same week in front of the entire Institute of Data Science. After freaking out with the group together, we decide to still go through with it. What made it more complicated next to the short time period was that I (David) was the only one available in the allocated time slot. But I wasn’t left alone, together with the team we created a presentation that was presentable enough until late in the evening of Wednesday (11 pm!).