From left: Eleanor Johnson, Anushka Pratavadhi, and Marcus Williams

The 2019 DC DataFest, a weekend-long data competition designed to find new insights and useful applications from a single data set and inspire undergraduate students with an interest in data science to participate in real-life applications involving unknown data, was held at Summit LLC Consulting April 5–7.

Although graduate students, faculty, and industry professionals are available throughout the weekend for assistance, these undergraduate students—representing the universities in the Washington area—do all the work themselves. Each team is allowed no more than five minutes and two or three PowerPoint slides to impress a panel of judges after two days of intense data wrangling, analysis, and presentation design.

The undergraduate members of George Mason University attended this year’s DataFest with a team comprised of statistics major and GMU Student Chapter President Eleanor Johnson, Computational and Data Science major Anushka Pratavadhi, and GMU Student Chapter Treasurer Marcus Williams, who is pursuing a degree in government and international politics.

The George Mason team was awarded the Best Insight Award for their work during the competition, which was sponsored by Summit Consulting, the University of Maryland Alumni Association, The Joint Program in Survey Methodology, Google, Pew Research Center, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Mathematica Policy Research, and the Washington Statistical Society.