PSGV Students Win Hackathon, Defeat Competitors with Decades of Data Analytics Experience

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Image via Penn State Great Valley.

Penn State Great Valley students Harsh Anand, Atharva Mungee, and Rahul Sharma wanted to learn more about solving sales forecasting problems when they decided to attend the Wawa HCL Hackathon last fall.

Participating in their first hackathon in the United States, the three data analytics graduate students won first place.

“Our approach was to learn the business and focus on using the right tools to model the given scenarios,” Mungee said. “It wasn’t about winning. Winning was one of the byproducts.”

With more than 130 participants at the Hackathon, including competitors with decades of data analytics experience and students from Ivy League universities, Anand, Mungee, and Sharma were excited for the challenge and learning more about solving sales-forecasting problems.

Participants were given a dataset with multiple years of sales information from Wawa convenience stores in Maryland. Using that information, external sources, and any generally available information from Wawa, the participants had to forecast future sales.

Anand, Mungee, and Sharma spent the first hour of the eight-hour event brainstorming ideas and planning how to tackle the task.

Click here to read more about the Penn State Great Valley students who won the Wawa HCL Hackathon.

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