During Fall semester of 2014 I took an electrical engineering elective. This elective dealt mostly with computer programming, specifically python and bash programming. I already had several years of informal training in linux environments, but I wanted to see how official training looked like.

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Part of the course was to compete in an analytics challenge. For class credit, we must analyze the data presented by the challenge and use Python to come up with conclusions. Other entries from other students may have used excel to analyze the data.  The class was broken into 6-7 groups. 

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My group consisted of three total students. There were 3 prompts, each with sets of data that we had to analyze. Our team chose to analyze the Merck prompt, which asked us to examine how their company’s move affected their employees. The company provided a data set of 2,500 employees, their zip codes, and the zipcodes of the two company locations.  

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By writing a python code that pinged google maps we were able to have raw data on exactly how far and how long the commute would be for every one of the 2,500 employees. We used this data to draw several conclusions which we listed on our infographic. 

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Our infographic did not have many of the pretty pictures that the other winning infographics had. What our infographic had was raw, calculated data. We even determined an alternate site to move the corporate headquarters by calculating distances from employees home zipcode, to every other zipcode that had an employee living in it. Using this data, we reduced employee commute time on average, and presented a zipcode to locate the corporate headquarters.

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While our infographic was mostly data, we were one of 395 entries, one of 20 chosen finalists, and won 2nd place in the 2014 Analytics Challenge. 

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Impact of a Corporate Move: Prompt

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Temple University 2014 Temple Analytics Winners

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