This spring, my team won Best Pitch at the Wesleyan QAC DataFest — a weekend-long data analysis competition hosted by Wesleyan’s Quantitative Analysis Center. Teams came from Wesleyan, Yale, UConn, Connecticut College, and Bentley, with industry professionals serving as judges and consultants throughout.

Our dataset came from Stormont Vail Health, a nonprofit health system serving northeast Kansas. We were tasked with finding something useful in it over the course of a weekend — no predefined question, just a large, messy dataset and a clock.

We focused on MyChart patient portal adoption and found a clear pattern: older patients were receiving enrollment emails but not following through. The passive email approach was leaving a segment of the patient population behind. Our recommendation was straightforward — replace it with in-person assisted onboarding for patients who weren’t converting on their own.

With two first-time data analysis students on the team, our edge wasn’t technical complexity, but clarity. We made a real recommendation to a real organization and built the presentation around that argument. That discipline of committing to one actionable finding instead of showing everything you found is something I’ll carry forward.

Two of my mentees from Applied Data Analysis were on my team, which made the weekend even better. Watching students I’d worked with in class hold their own in a multi-school competition was a good reminder of why the mentorship work matters.