The University of North Florida and a team of student data scientists partnered with nonprofits to help them improve their businesses through the applications of big data.
Now in its seventh year, the 12-week internship supports seven students who crunch data and provide solutions under the guidance of faculty mentors.
The interns receive networking opportunities that sometimes lead directly to employment.
A recent example is Brian Ferdman, who earned a master’s degree from the University of West Florida and participated in the UNF program before getting a strategy and analytic analyst job at CSX.
The 32-year-old Jacksonville native said the DSSG program helped prepare him for CSX by teaching him the structure of working within an organized business and collaborating with a team.
This year, interns worked as a team to assist three partners in making data-driven decisions for the following sponsors:
- Cathedral Arts Project sought to create a system for scoring feedback for after-school arts programs. The gathered data helped CAP create an Arts in Schools system that served as a measurement and designation that will quickly and accurately convey the depth and breadth of arts education opportunities in each DCPS school.
- GrowFL is dedicated to supporting and accelerating the growth of second-stage companies by providing their leaders with focused, efficient, and timely access to resources. Their goal for the 2023 DSSG project was to investigate patterns and trends with a primary focus to develop a dashboard to identify trends within the type of companies that receive support and view patterns of opportunities to expand program support.
- The Florida Philanthropic Network was assisted in developing a methodology to estimate Census undercounts in Florida counties. FPN was integral in raising awareness of and participation in the 2020 Census along with a steering committee of funders and nonprofits. Florida’s population was undercounted by 3.48% in the 2020 Census, which means Florida could lose up to $11 billion in federal funds by the end of the decade. To prevent this from happening in 2030, FPN and its partners seek to understand who was undercounted in the 2020 Census.
