Congratulations to the trio of stellar Computational and Data Science graduate students awarded scholarships through the Experian Scholars Program in High Performance Data Mining!

Mr. Andrew Fontenot (Ph.D. program), Mr. Rene German (Master of Science program) and Ms. Chloe Martin (Master of Science program) have been announced as Experian Scholars and awarded full-tuition scholarships through the program.

As modern environmental, biological, chemical and geophysical challenges grow and generate massive amounts of data, computational and data science are becoming essential to tackling these issues. The Experian Scholars Program in High Performance Data Mining is a partnership between Experian and Chapman University to attract and prepare top data science students. Through a generous donation from Experian, the School of Computational Sciences in the Schmid College of Science and Technology continues to be able to align its curriculum with the fields’ evolving needs.

Real-World Learning Opportunities 

With additional funding set aside by Experian, qualified students have the opportunity to intern at Experian’s Costa Mesa office. Interns work under the mentorship of Chapman faculty member Dr. Erik Linstead and they gain real-world experience with what companies like Experian need. Martin, one of the students selected for an internship, shared some of the work she did while interning at Experian:

“I had several opportunities to sit in on meetings and shadow analysts who were patient enough to talk me through many of their reports. I was also asked to design a mock-up online user interface for employees to report events, campaigns, or glitches in the order funnel, along with any potential or actual influence on orders and revenue. This event calendar will eventually be used within the company… I am now in charge of updating two traffic monitoring reports, a weekly affiliate by partner performance report, a search engine optimization report, and creating and maintaining a repository for raw data from on [an] online data collection tool…”

Staying Connected to Industry Trends 

The Experian partnership also allows Chapman faculty and administrators to gain valuable insight into industry trends. In this way, Chapman’s School of Computational Sciences keeps its finger on the pulse of industry and implement curriculum that prepares students for data science jobs upon graduation.