Great Learning is proud to announce its second successful run at Hackathons with its PGP-BABI students. The hackathon is a coveted opportunity that gives our students the perfect platform to put their learnings to test in a time-constrained environment.
Our corporate partner for the event, WNS, was represented by its Director, Analytics – Mr Anurag Dikshit. He comes with over 20 years of experience working in some of the biggest organizations like Cognizant, Evalueserve, RBS, and WNS. With 15 years of experience in market research and analytics, Mr Dikshit was the perfect mentor and speaker for our enthusiastic audience who interacted with him in an informative Q&A session.
The hackathon, conducted at 3 locations simultaneously (Gurgaon, Chennai, and Hyderabad), saw participation from 100+ students (from 80+ organizations) divided into 27 teams. A whopping 300+ submissions were made before the event was concluded and around 52 were made thereafter as our learners were zealously trying to improve their models and accuracy. A Wall Street style real-time Leaderboard ensured that our students could track their scores, compare their accuracy model to those in their other local teams, and finally across all 3 cities.
The problem statement for learners was to create a model to identify drivers of Customer Satisfaction in the airline industry. The learners were given 1,20,000+ records (each of which had 25+ parameters) to identify which factors are the most critical for customer satisfaction. Our learners used a range of algorithms, from Logistic regression, Neural networks, to Random Forest and KNN. The hackathon was a hard-fought contest for our learners. The difference between the accuracy of the models of the best and 10th best performing team was a minuscule 1.7%!
Some of the key highlights and learnings from the Hackathon were:
- There are multiple techniques to solve a business problem and the idea is to choose the one that will give the best result for the problem at hand.
- Real-life business problems always have a deadline so thinking on your feet is a critical skill for professional success.
- The Hackathon was a simulation of what the actual 2-3 month capstone project would feel like to work on. Although the longer capstone project is more thorough, this exercise was a good practice run to work towards capstone modules that come with a deadline.
- Hackathons are a sure shot way of improving your chances of making a career transition as several organizations conduct recruitment hackathons to sieve through for top performers.
- There is something for everyone, including candidates in senior roles! Senior professionals looking to build their companies’ analytical capability find the experience exhilarating as they learn how to recruit and what to look for in aspiring analysts.
- You don’t just compete amongst your batch members. The hackathon leaderboard keeps you on your toes by allowing you to see your performance in comparison to your previous submission, batch members, and fellow PGP-BABI comrades across other locations.
Check out the video below:
