The Institute is delighted to announce its practicum sponsors for the Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) Class of 2025. Student teams are tasked with projects from 18 sponsoring organizations. Once again this year the Institute welcomes an impressive line-up of new and returning sponsors to work with our students over the next 8 months, including our first projects with API, Artemis Health, Axios, Cymantix, Firstleaf, and Vertical IQ.
“We are extremely grateful to all of the sponsoring organizations—new and returning—for providing our students this valuable opportunity to develop their skills,” said the Institute’s director Dr. Michael Rappa. “The practicum is key to the MSA learning experience. It’s terrific to see our students working on real-world projects with such a diverse group of sponsors. The Institute applauds their commitment to the education of aspiring data scientists.”
A total of 39 practicum proposals were received through an open solicitation earlier in the year. The proposals were reviewed by a panel of faculty and staff members who weighed the scope, challenge, and learning value of the project. All of the projects are conducted under confidentiality and there is no fee for sponsors to participate.
Since 2007 the Institute’s students have engaged 307 team projects with over 150 lead sponsors from industry and government. Interested organizations are welcome to contact the Institute to learn more about practicum sponsorship.
Academic Programs International (API) encourages students of all ages to embark on a lifelong experiential educational journey. These experiences enrich lives, communities, and organizations. As well as helps every student, college, and company to achieve their goals. Through the creation of APIConnect, an experiential education technology platform, the company helps colleges, universities, and students create and discover learning experiences customized to meet their needs. APIConnect offers a vast library of destinations, accredited courses, internships, and original programming. All of which is geared toward maximizing students’ college experiences so they are better prepared for the workforce upon graduation. Based in Austin, TX, API sends thousands of students on hundreds of programs every year. This includes both virtually and in nearly 70 cities in 26 countries across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East. (Sector: Education Administration Programs)
Advance Auto Parts (Raleigh, North Carolina) is a leading automotive aftermarket parts provider that serves both professional installers and do-it-yourself customers. As of July 2024, Advance operated 4,776 stores and 321 Worldpac branches primarily within the United States, with additional locations in Canada, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The company also served 1,138 independently owned Carquest branded stores across these locations in addition to Mexico and various Caribbean islands. (Sector: Retail)
Founded in 2013, Artemis Health is a health data analytics company based in Salt Lake City, Utah. It offers a platform for self-insured employers with data about their benefits programs and tools to help them make decisions. (Sector: Software Development)
Axios (Arlington, Virginia) is a new media company delivering vital, trustworthy news and analysis in the most efficient, illuminating and shareable ways possible. It offers a mix of original and smartly narrated coverage of media trends, tech, business and politics with expertise, voice AND smart brevity — on a new and innovative mobile platform. Axios — the Greek word for worthy — provides only content worthy of people’s time, attention and trust. (Sector: Internet News)
Cymantix, founded in 2021, envisions a world in which we can enable thoughtful engagement with exponential information growth. Its goal is to create tools that inspire curiosity and transform the experience in how we search, share, and make meaning out of information. It aims to radically enhance information retrieval by providing powerful, intuitive, and adaptive methods to retrieval that unlock insights from complex unstructured data. (Sector: IT Services and IT Consulting)
Elevate (Fort Worth, Texas), and the banks it supports, provide responsible, tech-enabled online credit solutions to consumers for immediate relief today and help them build a brighter financial future. They are committed to rewarding borrowers’ good financial behavior with features like interest rates that can go down over time, free financial training and free credit monitoring. (Sector: Financial Services)
Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, Fifth Third Bank is among the largest money managers in the Midwest. It operates four main businesses—Commercial Banking, Branch Banking, Consumer Lending, and Wealth & Asset Management—and a network of financial centers in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Florida, Tennessee, West Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Consumers have access to approximately 54,000 Fifth Third fee-free ATMs across the United States, (Sector: Financial Services)
America’s most personalized wine company, Firstleaf (Napa, California) uses millions of data points to produce and curate each shipment of award-winning wine from around the world so that members can explore new bottles and discover new favorites tailored to their taste. Founded by Philip James, a wine industry veteran and Oxford-educated chemist, the subscription service unites the art and science of wine. Firstleaf brings together proprietary technology, expert winemakers and a WSET-certified wine concierge team, to build a unique Wine Profile for each member and curate each shipment individually. Nearly one million people have tried Firstleaf since the brand’s inception. (Sector: Beverage)
The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services manages the delivery of health- and human-related services for all North Carolinians, especially our most vulnerable citizens – children, elderly, disabled and low-income families. The Department works closely with health care professionals, community leaders and advocacy groups; local, state and federal entities; and many other stakeholders to make this happen. (Sector: Government Administration)
The North Carolina Joint Underwriting Association, also known as the FAIR (Fair Access to Insurance Requirements) Plan, is a tax exempt insurer of last resort created by law to provide adequate basic property insurance to property owners having insurable property in North Carolina. The NCJUA is an association of insurance companies authorized to write basic property insurance coverage in North Carolina. The North Carolina Insurance Underwriting Association, also known as the Coastal Property Insurance Pool, is a tax exempt association of insurance companies authorized to write and engaged in writing essential property insurance coverage in North Carolina. The Association was created by law to act as a market of last resort providing adequate essential property insurance to property owners having insurable property in the Beach and Coastal Areas of North Carolina. (Sector: Insurance)
Primrose Schools (Atlanta, Georgia), founded in 1982, is a national franchise company that provides high-quality early education and care to children and families across America. Our state-of-the-art school environment, exclusive Balanced Learning® approach and national Cognia™ accreditation have set us apart in the early education industry for over 40 years. There are more than 500 Primrose schools nationwide, serving children 6 weeks old through kindergarten and after-school students. Schools are independently owned and operated by dedicated local Franchise Owners. (Sector: Education Administration Programs)
Raleigh Water (City of Raleigh Municipal Government) provides water and sanitary sewer services to a service area population of approximately 630,000 residents in Raleigh, Garner, Wake Forest, Rolesville, Knightdale, Wendell and Zebulon areas. Raleigh Water produces some of the highest quality drinking water in North Carolina and has won Best Tasting Water in the 2022 and 2023 at the NC One Water Conferences. In addition, Raleigh’s water was recently rated 3rd best in an international taste testing competition. The Department also helps protect the environment through the operation the Neuse River Resource Recovery Facility, which treats an average of 50 million gallons of wastewater per day and has been in 100% compliance for 20 years. The facility will also produce Renewable Natural Gas as part of the Bio-Energy Recovery project which will help fuel up to 70 City buses. (Sector: Government Administration)
Red Hat (Raleigh, North Carolina) is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future. (Sector: Software Development)
Skin Laundry (El Segundo, California) – Skin Laundry is changing the way people treat and transform their skin through safe, effective, and affordable energy facials. The flagship location in Santa Monica opened in 2013, and there are currently over 30 clinics across the U.S. and around the globe. (Sector: Wellness and Fitness Services)
Vertical IQ (Raleigh, North Carolina), founded in 2010, delivers actionable, convenient, and focused Industry Intelligence businesses of all sizes need to increase sales. Covering more than 97% of the economic revenue in the U.S. and Canada through more than 920 Industry Profiles and 3,400 local economic reports, Vertical IQ equips users with the confidence and credibility to make memorable first impressions and sustain enduring relationships. (Sector: Information Services)
Visionist (Columbia, Maryland) builds teams of developers, analysts, designers, and data scientists to create and take responsibility for the success of critical intelligence projects. We tackle difficult problems with enthusiasm and agility, and our programs have real impact on the world. Unlike many small businesses, we have large prime contracts that offer growth and leadership opportunities. Visionist provides engineering, software development and analytical services, with specialization in the following areas: designing and developing visualization applications for data analysis; signals and cyber-related analysis; network penetration testing, vulnerability assessment and network security; database design and administration to support data analysis and reporting; software and hardware digital signal processing of high-bandwidth data. (Sector: Defense and Space Manufacturing)
Wells Fargo (San Francisco, California) – Wells Fargo is a diversified, community-based financial services company with approximately $1.9 trillion in assets. Founded in 1852 and headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking, investment and mortgage products and services, as well as consumer and commercial finance, through more than 7,300 locations, 12,000 ATMs, the internet and mobile banking, and has offices in over 40 countries and territories to support customers who conduct business in the global economy. With approximately 250,000 team members, Wells Fargo serves one in three households in the United States. (Sector: Financial Services)