DATA STORIES | YOUNG TALENTS | KNIME ANALYTICS PLATFORM
Where do Data-skilled Interns come from?
The “KNIME Student Challenge” program
The Academia — Industry gap
There is a lack of practice in the education of young data professionals. This produces a gap between academic offers and industry requests and the students are left on their own to fill it. Some join online competitions, some rely on private networking to find an internship, some do nothing and hope for the best. As a result, data science graduates delay for some months landing their first job position.
We at KNIME are sensitive to this topic. This sensitivity is born out surely of sympathy for the students to avoid idle time spent on the job market, but also from the consideration that we, in the corporate world, need a more prepared workforce, experienced enough to be ready to work from day one.
During a recent interview with Fabiola Martina Valverde, Operational Excellence Manager at Siemens Healthineers US, at the question about what is missing in academic curricula, her answer clearly lamented a lack of practical experience.
“Universities need to expose students to real-world scenarios where data is messy and imperfect. […] Two keyways to improve academic data science curricula are longer internships and more student challenges.”
On the other side, the academic counterpart often agrees. We need more practical learning through challenges and, if possible, through internships.
Based on Fabiola’s and other industry professionals’ suggestions, and encountering a positive response in education institutions, a few years ago, in collaboration with selected universities and available companies around the world, we started the “KNIME Student Challenge” program.
The “KNIME Student Challenge” program
The “KNIME Student Challenge” program has reached now its third year of activity, establishing a smooth and successful process to introduce gamification and practical learning within academic courses. The program relies on three parties: the industry sponsor, the academic institution, and the course students.
The corporate sponsor brings to the table the practical experience and the final awards for the winning teams. The academic educator introduces the rules, the required knowledge, and the challenge, based on a real-world dataset, and compatible with the students’ skills. Finally, the students bring the enthusiasm. They form teams and try to implement and document the most reliable, user-friendly, and efficient solution for the given challenge.
Challenge duration varies, taking into account other academic deadlines. In general, however, all student challenges follow the same steps. It starts with a public announcement, sometimes with a kick off workshop to explain the data and the task and to register the student teams. Teams get a few weeks to submit a well documented solution. A judging committee, formed by educators and industry experts evaluates all submissions and declares the finalist teams. Finalists have the chance to prove the quality of their solution with a public presentation, after which the winner team is decided and awarded.
It is indeed one of those rare cases with a win-win-win solution. The students acquire practical expertise, and some of them maybe even an internship in their future. The educator offers a course connected with an industry partner, enriched with practical experience, and with a gamification element. The sponsor gets to screen the students and secure the members of the top team for an internship.
You can find more details about this program in this article: “How KNIME supports Educators with Student Challenges”.
The Experience
Now, 16 student challenges and circa 20 interns later, we can safely state that the program works and works well. So far, we hosted many of the interns at KNIME and currently we are actively looking for companies to host the next generation of KNIME expert interns.
At KNIME, the experience with the interns has been wonderful. They are smart and enthusiastic, KNIME savvy — since we formed and selected to be so — and ready to work on data apps or web services already in the first week on the job. This does not mean that our interns do not need supervision. Of course, they do, especially where choices must be made and options for compromises evaluated. However, the onboarding, initial training, and general supervision they need is much lower compared to interns hired with the classic interview process. First of all, half an hour interview is often not enough to establish the hard and soft skills of the candidate. Secondly, with a student challenge we can form the future intern to have the exact skills we need.
Same experience at Siemens Healthineers US, the company that sponsors some of the KNIME student challenges. Fabiola Martina reports the following story:
“Recently, an intern joined a new department that heavily relied on reporting. They were overwhelmed because they had to produce a monthly report that joined data from five different sources, and it took hours each month. The intern, who was already skilled with KNIME, guided them in automating the entire process. At the end, what used to take six hours of manual work was reduced to a single button click. The intern was thrilled and proud to see their work have such an impact. Now, the team can run reports whenever they need to without worry about delays.”
We have seen the sponsor’s benefits from such challenges. Let’s see now the educator’s point of view, from Tobias Schlüter, professor of data analytics at TH Köln in Germany.
“With the hands-on approach of real challenges, students have to learn data science practically. Instead of me flipping through PowerPoint slides, they have to work with data, design workflows, and learn about challenges in a business context, with real data sets, project structures, deadlines, and ideally with managers from the field.”
Finally, the interns’ perspective, by Sergio Verga student at Università Milano-Bicocca in Italy.
“The experience has been truly wonderful and incredibly stimulating on both a professional and personal level. I have gained a wealth of practical knowledge through working on projects, explored innovative topics, and had the privilege of collaborating with inspiring colleagues in a dynamic environment. From day one, I felt valued and included in a forward-thinking and modern workplace, which has been a constant source of inspiration for me.”
It is truly a win-win-win opportunity.
The selected topics for the student challenges have been various, with data analytics and machine learning applied to the creative industries, in Business, Finance, and HR, to soccer analytics, for bioenergy predictions, to estimate injury severity, to evaluate the brain age, to classify smokers from biological measures, and more.
A detailed list of the student challenges so far is reported below.
2024
- “Machine Learning for Brain Age”, Università Federico II, Naples, Italy
- “Big Data Analytics in Business”, ISCTE, Lisbon, Portugal
- “Applications of Analytics in Business”, Clark University, Worcester, MS, USA
- “Course Cluster Crusade”, Penn State University, Great Valley, PA, USA
- “CarMax Analytics Showcase”, Virginia Commonwealth University VCU, Richmond, VA, USA
- “Smoking Body Predictions”, Bicocca University, Milan, Italy
2023
- “Soccer Analytics”, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
- “Biomass Analysis & Predictions for Bioenergy”, Università Federico II, Napoli, Italy
- “Predicting Injury Severity”, Oklahoma State University, Oklahoma City, OK, USA
- “KNIME for Databases”, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH, USA
2022
- “Machine Learning for Diabetes Prediction”, Bicocca University, Milano, Italy
- “Finance & HR”, Technische Hochschule, Cologne, Germany
- “Digital Health”, Virginia Commonwealth University VCU, Richmond, VA, USA
- “MindSpark 2.0”, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2021
- “Analytics in the Creative Industries”, LUISS University, Rome, Italy
Call for Educators and Sponsors
If you want to host or sponsor a challenge as an educator for your students, please fill the Application Form for KNIME Student Challenges.
If you are a company and would like to sponsor one of the student challenges of 2025 with or without student internship, please fill the “Application Form for Sponsors”.
Where will our next KNIME student challenge be?
