BU Today: Data Days for Good Gets Students to Address Real-World Challenges
Excerpt from BU Today | By: Joel Brown | March 18, 2025 | Photo: Cydney Scott
Crunch time hit just after 1:30 last Thursday afternoon in Room 1148C in MassMutual’s offices high above Boston’s Seaport District.
The five BU students on Team Weber gathered in front of a big screen for a final run-through of their slide deck. They would have 10 minutes to present the results of four solid days of work.
Rheona Mehta (CDS’26) had recorded her video. Ann Liang (CDS’25) crunched the numbers one more time. Joseph Allen (CDS’27, Questrom’27) and Rishabh Rishabh (ENG’25,’28) tweaked their animated map. Aiganysh Ulanova (CAS’25, CDS’26) edited her introductory and closing remarks, getting their total time down to, well, 10 minutes-ish.
“Don’t worry, we’ve got this,” Ulanova told her teammates.
They were among five teams of BU students who spent their spring break participating in MassMutual’s Data Days for Good, applying their computer skills to cracking real-world problems. Team Weber’s assignment came from Boston City Councilor Ben Weber and concerned elderly housing in District 6.
Bay State insurance giant MassMutual has been running the Data Days for Good program for its employees for years; this was the third year they sponsored an event for students in collaboration with the CDS Duan Family Spark! Initiative, the innovation and experiential learning lab housed at the Boston University Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. Each team had mentors from MassMutual and BU Spark! to guide them as little or as much as they needed.
“We have this unique opportunity, through our partnership with MassMutual, to give students a concentrated, short, immersive experiential learning opportunity during spring break,” says Ziba Cranmer, founding director of BU Spark! “It’s a really innovative model of how to leverage a week and give students something they can put on their résumé with a known brand or reputable company and to actually do something that’s interesting in a really short period of time.”
“Watching these presentations, I felt very proud of our students and what they can do when empowered with data and allowed to think outside the box,” says Azer Bestavros, associate provost for the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor. “It was inspiring to see their creativity at work and to see how resourceful they were. If this is what they can do in a few days over spring break working on Data Days for Good challenges, just imagine what they can do once they graduate!”