Second year Brock co-op student Meghan Monaghan spent her co-op work term learning the value of teaching youths the power of big data.

Working as a research analyst at St. Catharines-based rel8ed.to Analytics, Monaghan worked on the Educ8ed program that was designed to teach youth how to capitalize on data analytics and technology.

Bob Lytle, founder of rel8ed.to, talked about the program in a recent Conversations with Goodman podcast interview saying, “why do you have to wait until you get to university to learn big data? Why not teach it to high schoolers?”

The programming ran intensive sessions over five weeks that had participants aged 13-20 delving into data acquisition, data cleaning, research, predictive analytics and visualization technology to complete a project on a topic of their choice.

“Our goal for the program was to see if you could use big data to overcome maybe a fear of math or a fear of calculation by showing that the tools can lead you to a very interesting analytic result,” Lytle said.

The student interns, three from Niagara and two from Chicago, presented their final projects at a public event last week to an audience of more than 30 members of the Brock, government and local business communities.

Students articulately explained their research findings and data sources on a variety of topics from Olympic sports to social impact issues like crime and poverty.

Lytle is a strong supporter of Brock University and the Goodman School of Business and has hired several co-op students and graduates from various programs including the MBA business analytics specialization and the Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Humanities. He is now working in collaboration with Professor Anteneh Ayanso, Director of the University’s new Centre for Business Analytics, which will begin operations this fall.

“Goodman is turning out some incredibly high-skilled, high-quality candidates and not just with the technical aspect of looking at the tools … but really thinking about the story behind the numbers,” Lytle said.

Lytle’s advice to students looking to get into the field of data analytics is to understand their value.

“As a business student, you are coming in maybe the ultimately practical degree area where you are thinking about how to improve and drive commerce and because of that you need to present yourself as being of the world and understand that how your technical learning can have a definite impact,” he said.

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