University of Cincinnati senior Daniel Posmik saw a need last year for companies to get analytics help, and he knew just where to find it: on the school’s campus.
Posmik decided to do something about it and founded an on-campus group called Neo. It pairs UC students with mentors from Greater Cincinnati businesses. They help small businesses, primarily minority-owned companies, with analytics-related issues.
“I’ve seen how painful data analytics can be, especially for smaller companies,” Posmik, who is Neo’s president, told me.
It has worked with Cincinnati entrepreneurship hub Mortar and Over-the-Rhine-based Good Company Apparel, among others.
But the idea is also to provide job opportunities for those students at the companies providing mentors. Walnut Hills-based management consultant Amend Consulting and downtown-based data analytics firm 84.51, a unit of Kroger Co., have both provided mentors.
All three of Neo’s project leaders last semester were hired by Amend. 84.51 is new to the program this year.
“We can find incredible talent this way,” Amend CEO Craig Todd told me. “They bring grit, a strong work ethic and the ability to work with customers. It’s a great skill set.”
84.51 is providing data scientists as mentors to help students run data science projects, said Terron Wilson, 84.51's diversity and inclusion manager.
"It has been incredibly rewarding to help both the students learn and the minority businesses benefit from the expertise of 84.51 employees,” Wilson said.
About 50 students have participated in the program that’s now in its third semester, Posmik said. Most are analysts, with others serving as project leaders. Several serve as executive members, too. UC students dedicate five hours a week to the program.
Current projects include a market research project for The Voice of Black Cincinnati, a website featuring news, event calendars, job postings and scholarships aimed at creating opportunities for African Americans. It’s part of Walnut Hills-based marketing consulting firm The Voice of Your Customer, of which Crystal Kendrick is president. The Neo project aims to find out what Black Cincinnatians want to see in a media company. It feeds that information into a dashboard the company can use to provide better information for customers.
Neo also teamed with Mortar for the Mortar x Neo Academy. That 12-week program provides companies with systems assistance, Posmik said. That includes digital analysis, setting up a customer relationship management system, feeding information into a database and other guidance.
Posmik started Neo because it combines his areas of interest.
“I’m a social justice nut,” he said. “For me, it’s how I combine my identity as an activist with my identity as a scholar to help small businesses.”
He has much bigger plans for Neo. Posmik wants to expand it to universities across the country. He has already started on that path, with students from the University of Wisconsin, Ohio Wesleyan and Stanford participating in this semester’s group.
