Project of the Year Team: (from left):  Dr. Leora Morgenstern, Senior Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at SAIC, with students Shiran Beroukhim, Jason Felder, Jeff Jacobs, Ryan Murphy, Avi Prince, and faculty advisor Bruce Golden, France-Merrick Chair in Management Science at the Smith School.

UMD Student Consulting Projects Make Impact on Local Businesses
Seniors Present at Annual QUEST Senior Conference

Students in the University of Maryland’s Quality Enhancement Systems and Teams (QUEST) honors program are used to making an impact. As part of QUEST’s highly selective, reality-based learning program, they participate in courses focused on cross-functional collaboration, innovation, quality management and teamwork.

Twelve consulting projects were featured at the 2011 QUEST Senior Conference, held on Thursday, December 8, 2011. More than 300 people gathered at the University of Maryland’s Riggs Alumni Center to view the storyboards and hear student teams describe their consulting projects on a night that capped off months of hard work and preparation.

These consulting projects form the senior practicum portion of the honors program. QUEST, part of the Robert H. Smith School of Business Undergraduate Fellows Program, is operated jointly with the A. James Clark School of Engineering and admits students from the Smith School, the Clark School and the College of Mathematical, Computer and Physical Sciences.

Seniors in the QUEST program spend the better part of the fall semester working with a faculty adviser on consulting projects for corporations, all of which have real-life importance and implications. This year student teams worked on 12 consulting projects for nine companies in industries that ranged the gamut from defense to entertainment.

Each of the consulting projects resulted in a dynamic learning experience for the students as well as creative, real-life business solutions for the sponsoring companies. Working side-by-side with clients gives students a chance to put theory to practice in the messy, complicated, often-frustrating world of a real business.

“Over the past semester, we were in daily contact with our client liaison, either through e-mail, teleconference or site visits,” said one student. “We spent many late hours – at least two to three times a week – meeting in the QUEST conference room (known as ‘the Octagon’) teleconferencing with our client.”

The “Project of the Year” team consulted with SAIC on the application of artificial intelligence in order to predict financial and political crises on the global economic stage. They explored whether a machine can grasp the underlying ideas presented in an article and use them to predict an impending financial crisis.

“For  example, if you go onto the Wall Street Journal's website and search for ‘criticism,’ you will find many articles containing the word ‘criticism’ – many of which are not actually being critical of anything. Our method is attempting to extract deep ideas like cynicism, positivity and deceit rather than simple topics which can be obtained via a word search. It was our hypothesis that this idea extraction would allow better predictions, and our preliminary results are extremely promising in this regard,” said Shiran Beroukhim, a senior in computer science, who was part of the “Project of the Year” team.

“We are honored to say that within the past month, SAIC submitted two separate proposals to government agencies to win business, valued at $600,000 and $5 million, respectively. The proposals contained the results from our semester-long research project,” said Beroukhim.

Joe Bailey, executive director of the QUEST Honors Program and research professor at the Smith School, added that SAIC already had a sophisticated machine reading algorithm and with the validation from this project, they will be able to better compete on projects in the financial sector.

“The Senior Conference is a fantastic event that brings together the broader QUEST community – corporate partners, alumni, families – to celebrate a great achievement,” said Bailey. “This is a very difficult project – condensing a semester’s worth of work into one 15-minute presentation – and they all do an amazing job.”   

Giving students the opportunity to work with real-life executives on real-life business problems is a win-win situation for both students and businesses. Many of the companies – like SAIC – keep coming back to QUEST with new projects every year.

2011 Consulting Project Clients:

• ATK Missile Products Group
• ATR
• Booz Allen Hamilton
• Bowles Fluidics
• ezStorage
• Lockheed Martin
• SAIC
• Time Warner Cable
• Unilever

QUEST would like to thank conference sponsors ATK, Capital One, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, and SAIC.
For more information about QUEST consulting projects, please contact Nicole Coomber. ncoomber@rhsmith.umd.edu

See more photos from this event.

Alissa Arford, Office of Marketing Communications