Going Above and Beyond to Bring Co-op Data to Life
Every LeBow MS in Business Analytics student completes a capstone: an academic course, in collaboration with an external client or partner, that ties together all of the skills and techniques that students have learned during their graduate studies.
Two recent graduates layered on an additional experience during their final quarter, demonstrating an even greater range of skills in a crowning achievement on top of their already impressive work.
Using data-visualization software PowerBI and drawing on recent survey data from LeBow undergraduate students and the companies where they worked on co-op, Valentina Serna, BSBA sport business ’22, MS business analytics ’26; and Prachi Ghogare, MS business analytics ’26 built a dashboard designed to connect student experiences and employer feedback to key skills and academic areas.
This project required both students to draw upon skills learned throughout their graduate studies: programming in both Python and R, data mining, and machine learning to create models for data clustering and regression.
“In a way, it was both the end of our master’s program and the start,” Serna says. “Many projects, including our capstone, were unstructured without a clear path. This had a clear problem and clear deliverable.”
This project’s roots reach back to a course from their first quarter, Aligning Information and Business Strategies, taught by Vice Dean and Professor of MIS Murugan Anandarajan, PhD: analyzing one year of data from student and employer feedback and creating a dashboard to display insights.
Though several classes of analytics students have completed similar projects, Anandarajan and Senior Director of Data and Analytics Sarah Haley, wanted to take it to the next level.
“They asked us enhance it, improve it and make adjustments,” Serna says. “Starting from the dashboard we delivered, we worked to build a sustainable process using multiple years of data and a plan for future data.”
Working in collaboration with Drexel’s Steinbright Career Development Center and with guidance from Anandarajan and Haley, Serna and Ghogare layered on additional deeper analysis: mapping survey responses to key skill areas such as leadership, communications, organization and time management, to better pinpoint how both student and employer benefited from the experience.
“We applied everything we learned in all of our classes throughout the program,” says Ghogare.
“Though it began as an academic project, we learned so many different concepts and discovered a more professional perspective, compared to what we did in class,” she adds, pointing to the use of natural language processing (NLP) models as an important, later-stage addition.
NLP allowed them to develop a dictionary of responses, connecting sought-after skills to academic areas and curricula and identifying program gaps.
Both students noted Haley’s support and mentorship throughout the project’s many phases — at least 15 iterations, by their estimates — and her emphasis on making the dashboard user-friendly for individuals without technical backgrounds.
“She was always there as a resource for us to lean on and ask questions,” Serna says. “She’d pose these challenges, and by the next time we’d meet, we would have it figured out.”
“They rose to the challenge of transforming a one-off dashboard into an automated, end-to-end process with a flexible design pattern,” Haley says, noting that LeBow’s Center for Career Readiness can now leverage this data year-over-year and for accreditation purposes, moving from point-in-time insights to longitudinal trend analysis.
“By mapping outcomes to NACE professional standards and accreditation requirements, they’ve ensured that student voices are no longer just ‘text,’ but a vital part of the conversation for our academic and co-curricular planning.”
Serna notes that Steinbright has collected this data for years, and though the project used just LeBow’s data, she says, “it’s scalable can be extended to other schools and colleges.”
Within LeBow, for now, the project raises some enticing questions: What courses are being used the most, and what skills need to be further developed?
“We made the dashboard not just to be relevant now, but to be more organic so that it will stick around and be used for many years,” Ghogare says. “It will be used by Steinbright and by academic departments within the University, as well as by employers, to make the co-op experience more fulfilling for everyone.”
