Andrade and Mohan Provide Value to Credit Union through Capstone Project
Author: Marshall V. King
Dave Mohan – Graduating Class of 2023
Students Gain Insight into Credit Unions
Dave Mohan and Roberto Andrade now keenly understand how credit unions work.
The two were part of a capstone project helping a credit union in the Midwest assess its customer review data. Some 60,000 rows of data provided insight into what customers valued at the credit union.
Analyzing that much qualitative data was challenging and the students worked with professors and the credit union to break down customer sentiments over the course of a semester. “We had lots of time to get feedback from the professors from the sponsors and more input from our classes to keep approaching the problem in several different ways,” said Andrade, who graduated with his MSBA in May 2023.
Capstone Project Leads to Valuable Insights for Credit Union
They built a topic model that would classify each comment under one of nine topics, said Mohan. Their research uncovered that one of the programs being touted on the credit union’s website wasn’t being mentioned in customer comments. “We did make the recommendation to reconsider touting the program on the site,” Andrade said.
Roberto Andrade – MSBA Class of 2023
They also discovered that the credit union had changed its prompt for feedback in 2021 and started receiving fewer comments. “It’s very difficult to know what’s going on and why you’re not getting comments,” Andrade said. “So offering advice about what really happened around that time will help them try and get that feedback in the future.”
The topic model could be applied to future data and even be changed to account for new topics. “This was quite a unique project that wasn’t just about the data given to us,” Mohan said. “It was about designing scripts that were optimized for reusability.”
Project Provides Lasting Value for Business and Students
Together they were able to create views of the data that progressed toward a final product that has lasting value to the sponsoring business.
Andrade enjoyed working for a business and having to clearly communicate face-to-face with those who may not understand the technical language of data analysis. The shared experience of working as a team on the capstone project was also valuable to all of them.
After graduation, they’ll be applying those lessons in other business settings. “I entered Notre Dame with zero technical skills or coding knowledge. So that was something huge that I was able to pick up over my four years here and become proficient in multiple different languages,” said Mohan, who is going to work for LinkedIn. “And then also, given the combination of business and analytics, telling a data story has been a huge integral part of my experience, learning how to translate data into business value.”
