Mentors
ASA DataFest's goal is to provide undergraduate students a fun, rewarding experience that builds their analytical skills and boosts their confidence tackling real‑world problems. To support the effort, we welcome mentors from campus and the industry to stop by, offer advice and help guide student teams throughout the event.
We’ll have small teams of roaming mentors with different skills available throughout the event. As a mentor, your biggest role is to keep the vibe positive, encouraging, and collaborative!
On Friday night, students will be digging into the dataset, and some may need help getting started with loading data, exploring it, or just figuring out where to begin. Throughout the weekend, teams work mostly on their own, but mentors are encouraged to drop by, check in, and offer guidance.
Students will ask all kinds of questions - some in your wheelhouse, some not. If something’s outside your expertise, no problem. Help them think through it: break the problem into smaller steps, consider the context, or talk through what they expected to see and why.
And don’t worry - this is a friendly, collaborative competition. Sharing knowledge isn’t “giving answers”; it’s part of the fun. If you can help, please do. And feel free to encourage teams to help each other, too!
Students will not receive access to the dataset until Friday evening. That is when an event official will introduce the dataset, outline the challenge and introduce the mentors who are present.
The outlined challenge may point to some specific questions that can be answered. However, mentors should encourage the teams to think about the dataset in as large a context as possible, to seek helpful (and sometimes not obvious) insights and to explore any interesting hypotheses they might generate.
Most students will likely use R, but many will also rely on Matlab, Python, SAS, Excel, and ArcGIS Pro. If asked for help with any application or computing platform you’re not familiar with, simply stating so is sufficient. Other mentors may be able to offer assistance.