DataFest Returns: ‘An amazing experience for students’

Student teams are gearing up for the third in-person DataFest event at Cal Poly in April. This image showcases the 2025 event. 

March 2026 / NEWS STORY
by Nick Wilson

The academic competition that tests students' statistical/data science chops is around the corner.

The third in-person American Statistical Association’s DataFest competition will take place on the Cal Poly campus April 17-19 in the Advanced Technology Laboratories and Bonderson Center.

The competition, hosted by the Statistics Department, resembles a hackathon-style experience. Over a roughly 48-hour period, students are tasked with analyzing large, confidential datasets (to be released after university teams nationwide end their competitions in May).

Students collaborate in teams to coordinate their work and present their findings in person to judges.

Last year, more than 80 students from two universities, Cal Poly and CSU Monterey Bay, participated with teams of students winning Best in Show, Best Visualization and Best Use of Outside Data awards.

“This is an amazing experience for students, which they can cite on their resumes, showing they’ve worked on an unstructured data problem,” said Emily Robinson, a statistics faculty member and event coordinator. “It’s an extremely applicable skill to learn how to work as a team, sometimes with people they’ve never met.”

Students at the 2025 DataFest event at Cal Poly.

In 2025, the team from Cal Poly that won Best in Show consisted of students (Tara Rajagopalan, Barbara Ibrahim, Charlotte Kuebitz and Kaviya Veerasingam) who didn’t know each other before they started.

In presenting and meeting a panel of judges, students hone their public speaking and learn from feedback and questions from industry leaders.

The ASA committee partners with a different company each year to provide regional events a real-world data set and challenge that can be approached in a multitude of ways, which can lead to unique solutions and insights when you have so many teams tackling the same challenge from different directions.

The 2025 challenge, held in partnership with a major firm, focused on commercial real estate leasing trends and required students to work with complex, multidimensional data and apply it in practical ways.

“My favorite part about it was realizing that you are working on a real-life dataset,” said Sriyans Kanneganti, a second-year Cal Poly statistics major. “The conclusions you formulate from the data actually have significance. It felt like I was a data analyst at a company and I was given an assignment to present insights to my boss.”

Natalie Sakamoto, a third-year statistics major and data science minor, said she enjoyed “cleaning, filtering, and joining messy data was a fun challenge since in class we usually work with smaller toy data sets that are relatively clean.”

Sakamoto added: “This year I’m mostly looking forward to having fun and learning. Last year felt a little daunting because it was my first time, but I realized it’s way better when you relax and treat it like a learning experience.”

Third-year statistics major Lenka Masic participated in DataFest 2025 at Cal Poly, acknowledging initial butterflies: “I felt a bit nervous as I did not know what to expect. However, it turned out to be a great low stakes, yet competitive, opportunity to apply statistical analysis to real-world data. The most enjoyable part was working with my friends and learning how to tackle a large dataset as a team in a supportive learning environment.”

The 2026 competition will again include CSU Monterey students and many Cal Poly students, including some majors outside of statistics, such as computer science.

“Most students are coming in with either R or Python (programming tools) experience,” Robinson said. “But last year, we had a team of first-year students who really didn't have either of those software tools, and they still were able to use JMP software that they learned in their first stats class. If students knew something like Datawrapper or Tableau, they could certainly use that. There’s no restriction on using a certain software or who can participate.”

Students work in teams of about three to five students, receive their challenge at 5 p.m. Friday, work until about 10 p.m. that evening, then all day Saturday, and finalize their work on Sunday before presenting to industry judges on the final day of the competition.

“This year, I am looking forward to coming in with a more refined skill set as I have another year of classes under my belt,” Kanneganti said. “I want to see how creatively I can apply the material I have learned in class to a raw dataset that has not been curated for the course I am taking.”

Coordinators will be fundraising to help pay for costs associated with the event. Stay tuned for a Crowdfund drive that launches in April to help support the program and help fund this year’s activities.

Additionally, coordinators are always seeking judges from industry, including professionals from the Bay Area and Los Angeles area. Anyone interested can visit the following site and fill out the form to serve as a judge in future years.

“We see what this experience does for students,” Robinson said. “We're very excited about it and eager to see it continue to grow and thrive.”

2025 DataFest student competitors.