Real Data, Real Experience
Statistical practice students learn on the job with MSSP Consulting
The beating heart of BU’s Master of Science in statistical practice (MSSP) is its practicum, a semester-long project that gives students experience working with local companies, governmental organizations, or nonprofits. Sometimes, their client is BU.
The program is a win-win, says Masanao Yajima, a professor of the practice of mathematics and statistics and director of MSSP Consulting, the name the students work under. Student groups help partner organizations define and understand statistics problems. Sometimes, the projects require specialized problem-solving, like crunching data from air quality monitors in Boston Public Schools. By the time they finish their MS, they will have worked on several real-life projects with partners like Fidelity Investments, Alira Health, or the City of Boston.
During the spring 2024 semester, MSSP students worked with BU Sustainability. To achieve its goal of carbon neutrality by 2040, the University must calculate the carbon emitted to produce and transport everything it buys and identify corresponding offsets—or encourage its vendors to improve their own efficiency. Working with Stephen Ellis, director of data analytics for BU Sustainability, 11 MSSP students analyzed data sets of products purchased from four of BU’s most prominent vendors—SHI, Thermo Fisher Scientific, W.B. Mason, and Lenovo—which provide the University with everything from paper clips to sophisticated lab equipment.
The students found that the amount and quality of emissions-related data provided by the companies varied significantly. They scraped the web for information on product quantities, types, and categories. And they were able to calculate or estimate emissions for some groups of products.
For the students, the partnership with BU Sustainability provided critical experience making sense of data sets and answering real business questions. “I hope I can become a data or machine learning analyst,” says Yuchen Huang (GRS’26), who worked with the data set from Lenovo. “This project helped me a lot. I learned that many raw data are missing variables, and I need to ask others and do research to analyze it. It also helped me to develop the skills to communicate with group members.”
At the end of the semester, the students presented their findings to BU Sustainability staff. Yajima says he was impressed by their creativity in the search for missing data. The work has benefited the University, offering a blueprint for future reports that BU Sustainability will create. And, says Yajima, “BU Purchasing can communicate with the vendors and say, ‘Why don’t you give us this information?’ That would change how BU Sustainability will report things in the future. We just got the conversation started.”