Capstone class “challenges the status quo” of learning

 

When the co-directors of DePaul’s M.S. in Business Analytics program, Khadija Ali Vakeel and Sina Ansari, embarked on rethinking the program’s capstone last year, they knew they wanted it to center on a collaboration with real-world companies.

This approach promised to set students up for success in industry. But it also posed challenges. Real-world datasets are often messy. Clear answers aren’t guaranteed. Distilling insights from data is as much art as it is science, demanding storytelling skills as well as analytical savvy.

In a word, the setup for the M.S. in Business Analytics capstone “challenges the status quo” of how most classes are taught, according to Vakeel.

“Students lead their own projects,” she said. “Students pose their own questions and find their own answers, supported by the instructor and industry partners. They are discovering things. It pushes them to think about their own creativity and storytelling as well as analysis — all in a very compact time of 10 weeks.”

Students offer companies a fresh perspective

Vakeel and Ansari launched the new, hands-on version of the capstone project in spring 2024. That year, with the help of a third-party mediator, Altheon AI, the program collaborated with Skyline Design and Valqari.

In fall 2024, the program began collaborating with Reyes Holdings, a food and beverage distributor that is the sixth largest privately held company by revenue in the U.S. according to a list compiled by Forbes. That collaboration has continued ever since.

Reyes has a vast logistics network with a trove of data to match. Powered by AI, cameras in truck cabs collect virtually every kind of data imaginable. Are drivers eating or texting while they drive? Are they leaving an adequate stopping distance?

Most of all, Reyes wanted to know, how effective were its coaching programs? What could it do to make its operations safer — and bring down costs in the process?

The company had in-house experts to answer those questions. But it also needed a fresh perspective.

That’s where DePaul students came in.

“The students have so much energy,” said Vakeel. “They think outside the box. When employees of the company are looking at the same data day in and day out, they might not be able to see what a fresh perspective from students can bring in.”

The power of data — from unearthing hidden stories to driving strategy

The brief for the project was intentionally open-ended. Student groups could choose which variables to look at, how to analyze them, and how to put them in context.

In capstone instructor Nidhal Bouazizi’s words, the project offered an invitation to “get a little messy with the data.”

“We were just given this dataset and the objective to enhance driver safety. There were no other real guidelines,” said Nithya Abraham, one of the students in Bouazizi’s latest winter quarter class. “That wasn’t because of our professor; that was the nature of the project. You have to play with the dataset and figure things out on your own.”

For Abraham’s class, that dataset was an intimidating file spanning over 100 columns and nearly 300,000 rows. Ongoing guidance from Bouazizi helped the student teams refine their approach. So did representatives from Reyes Holdings, who worked closely with the class throughout the term.

Some teams analyzed how factors like time and location affected risky behaviors. Others, including Abraham’s, looked at the firm’s coaching programs, comparing their effectiveness across different subsidiaries around the country.

Often, the hardest part wasn’t sifting through data fields or crafting complicated predictive models. It was figuring out how to chart a course through the data that could lead to an actionable recommendation.

In that choice lay a key lesson of the capstone project: Data is only as useful as the recommendations distilled from it.

“We could have gone and talked about a thousand things, but we stuck to focusing on preventing near-collision events to align with the cost-saving objective,” said student Alyssa Kozal. “We wanted to make a strong recommendation. And I think that made our presentation strong too.”

Or, as Bouazizi put it: “recommendations are how you monetize the data.” Recommendations — and the narratives that connect recommendations directly to the data.

Ultimately, the story of the M.S. in Business Analytics capstone project isn’t merely about students’ considerable technical expertise, or even their creativity and drive in applying it to real-world scenarios. It’s about the power of connecting statistics to strategy — and about what happens when students get the chance to think like a leader.

Kozal and her teammates, Malika Diwakar and Srushti Summanwar, were among a select few teams who got the chance to present their findings directly to executives from Reyes Holdings.

“It was important to us to have a storyline,” said Diwakar. “Who are we? What was our objective in this process? We really focused” — inspired by guidance from Bouazizi, she added — “on explaining our entire thought process, beginning to end.”

That’s part of what the capstone class gives students, said Vakeel: the ability to tell stories not just about the data, but about the process of sifting through it. The ability, in that way, to connect a company’s operations on the ground now to its strategy moving forward.

“I’m not someone who can sit at a screen for eight hours coding,” said Abraham. “What I do enjoy is looking at datasets, drawing insights from them, and making recommendations based on those insights. The capstone solidified that this is what I like doing. This is where I want to build my career.”

For students and companies alike, the capstone opens up new possibilities

Business analytics is a growing field. Bouazizi and Vakeel cite a number of students who leveraged their capstone experience to secure internships. One of Bouazizi’s students even landed a full-time role working for a manufacturer of AI-equipped cameras like the ones Reyes uses.

“This hands-on experience puts our students at a huge competitive advantage,” said Bouazizi. “We’re not providing you with a case study somebody wrote. This is the real deal.”

This spring, the program will partner with LabelMaster in addition to Reyes. That will give students the opportunity to pick a project that aligns with their career goals. It will also, Vakeel stressed, be just as beneficial for industry partners as it is for students.

“I’d say that this is a call to action to Chicago-based companies who want to partner with us,” said Vakeel. “We are open to such strategic partnerships, and we would welcome them in the future.”

“The responsibility involved in these projects is very high,” she added. “But the students have made us proud. It is a win-win situation—for DePaul, for our students, and for the companies.”