Summer Mathematics Undergraduate Research Fellow
In May, I participated in a study away program led by Furman professors where I spent a month in Orlando, Florida learning about the analytics that drive the Disney experience. The program lasted three weeks and students worked on projects alongside Disney professionals that focused on optimization, graph theory and workforce scheduling. Afterward, under the guidance of Drs. Bouzarth, Hutson, and Harris, I spent eight weeks as an undergraduate research fellow developing a data-based… Show more In May, I participated in a study away program led by Furman professors where I spent a month in Orlando, Florida learning about the analytics that drive the Disney experience. The program lasted three weeks and students worked on projects alongside Disney professionals that focused on optimization, graph theory and workforce scheduling. Afterward, under the guidance of Drs. Bouzarth, Hutson, and Harris, I spent eight weeks as an undergraduate research fellow developing a data-based mathematical model to predict upsets in the March Madness basketball tournament. Our ensemble model was built in partnership with ESPN using season and tournament data from 2007-2021, and I am proud to say that when tested on 2022 games, our model was 76.74% accurate. To learn more about our research, please see the attached poster. Following the basketball project, we partnered with Touring Plans, a data-analytics focused company that tries to optimize guests' experience at Walt Disney World. Our research focused on examining the impact of downtime for Remy's Ratatouille Adventure Ride in Epcot. Our goal was to model where visitors went following an outage, and we quantified the percent increase in ridership that the ten most popular attractions in Epcot experienced following this downtime. To learn more about our research, please see the attached poster.During these experiences, I gained a mastery with Excel, Tableau, Gephi, Neo4j, and an understanding of how techniques in data analysis such as clustering are used in a professional setting. We were also able to present both our basketball and Disney research at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM) and at Furman Engaged. Show less