Insider Insights: Meet Statistics and Data Science Senior Parul Gupta

Parul Gupta stood on stage, ecstatic as the Major League Hacking representative pinned her. Although the pin was small, it represented a big win: Gupta and his team had just won second place out of more than 80 teams at UT San Antonio’s hackathon, RowdyHacks.

It’s times like these that Gupta is most proud to be part of the first statistics and data science (SDS) team at the University of Texas at Austin. Gupta, a junior who is also working in a small business and pursuing a certificate in programming and computation, shared how UT has helped him succeed in and out of the classroom.

“I feel like my SDS is great, even though it’s a technical degree and falls under the College of Natural Sciences, it’s actually a very different one,” Gupta said. “We take classes where we take practical science, and we also take hard math and programming-based classes.”

Gupta’s interest in public health and statistics was sparked by competing in the Disease Detectives event at the Science Olympiad as a high school student. But while his career plans have changed from becoming a doctor to pursuing data science, his passion for public health lives on.

“As I got older, I realized that patient care wasn’t the field I wanted to go into, but I learned that you can still use statistics and programming to make an impact in the field of health care,” Gupta said. “Actually, recently in my machine learning class, we had to choose a paper and give examples of the types of machine learning that were used in education, and I focused in a paper on age-related macular degeneration. .”

While his rigorous education has strengthened his technical skills, Gupta said it has also strengthened his critical thinking.

“The information is not clear. It’s messy, and there’s no clear way to deal with it, which is why, whenever you make a decision with data, you have to make sure you have solid reasons,” Gupta said. “Since I’m used to looking at different types of data, I want to know more.”

During his freshman year at UT, Gupta competed in a challenge called DataFest at Southern Methodist University. During the competition, he and his team devised a way for the company’s customer to understand where their resources are allocated and where they should not allocate more to prevent losses.

Although he and his friends were the smallest team in the competition, they used the tools they learned in their theme, especially a package called R Shiny. It provides a way to create web-based applications by pulling from a data set.

“It was great to be ranked in the top five for ‘Best Data Visualization,'” Gupta said. “It felt good to do meaningful work and to know that all these ideas were being fed back into the company.”

Last year, following the example of Gupta and his team, five teams of students from UT competed in DataFest. Four of the five teams won top honors last year because former contestants were able to guide them with what they had learned.

“I feel like being part of the first batch of SDS, we started something that students can carry forward,” Gupta said.

Although Gupta has found success in competitions held by other schools, he has also made his mark at UT as part of the Freetail Hackers corporate group, an organization that runs two annual hackathons at UT. As part of the team, Gupta works to raise funds and recruit sponsors for hackathons.

Gupta may have developed different skills through hackathons, but he says his education in data science is a powerful tool in itself, one he will carry throughout his career.

“The way I look at data science is as a tool to learn more about other things,” Gupta said. “If you are a business oriented person, data science is used to help prevent business losses by predicting the speed of success of something. If you are interested in health care, you can use data science to analyze health patterns or disease transmission. ”