Opportunity to apply data analytics skills inspires Academic Program Datathon Challenge winner

[Pankaj_Muthe]

 Ng Ying Xue (YX) is the challenge five winner of our first ever global Qlik Academic Program Datathon. She is an Accountancy and Business Analytics student at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In the early years of her university life, YX gained interest in analytics and that’s how her journey began. This further led to her active involvement in her school’s Business Analytics Club while taking up the role of the Club’s president in her senior year.

It was as during her time in the Club that her interest began in data visualization. As a new analytics student at that time, YX was rather fascinated with the capabilities of data visualization software, which she says, “allows self-service analytics for anyone, especially for individuals without a technical background.”

YX first tried Qlik during her analytics internship and was rather amazed at all the features it possessed. She found the interface easy to navigate, and she worked on a small project using Qlik. During the internship, she also did some research and learned about the Qlik Academic Program. She signed up for the program and immediately started taking the training courses offered by Qlik. YX was impressed at how customizable the software could be and the extensive extensions available. However, she felt there were few opportunities to apply the skills she had learned and to present use of the software outside of the few data visualization projects she had during her internship.

Opportunity came knocking when early this year, YX’s Professor shared an email regarding the Academic Program Datathon Qlik had organised. She was motivated by the idea of being able to apply her data visualization skills to create a data-driven solution towards a resilient climate and planet. YX thought this was also a good avenue to apply what she had learned, and to showcase how data could be applied to solve problems using Qlik. However, since she did not have much experience with Qlik, she struggled a bit initially. YX found inspirations from some examples on the Qlik demos site and made full use of the forums to get answers to questions regarding the features or extensions she wanted to implement in her application.

YX says, “Since there are limited opportunities for students like myself to apply our skillsets to the real-world context, I am extremely grateful to Qlik for organizing this Datathon. Through my participation in the Datathon, I was able to reaffirm my passion for analytics and problem solving. Moving forward, I am looking to continuously improve my skillsets and make a change using the power of data.”

Register now to watch YX and the other Datathon challenge winners present their amazing solutions during QlikWorld Online. Don’t forget to vote for your favorite solution and help Qlik award the overall winner of the Datathon!