150 Voices
Team members: Sam Carlson, Sarah Torio, Ronnie Wright
Faculty advisor: Dr. Richard Figge, Emeritus
Project Description: For this project, we produced, wrote, and edited over 50 interviews for podcasts lasting 3-12 minutes long. To produce these casts, we contacted hundreds of alumni and faculty and staff. In interviews we asked a general set of questions while having specific questions designed for each one of our interviewees. We edited out the “fat” and kept the “meatier” parts of the interviews. The results of these methods gave us 76 interviewees, and over 90 podcasts with thought provoking answers and heart felt responses. The original name of the project, The College of Wooster Alumni Board Storycorps AMRE project, was changed to Project 150 (Pronounced: Project one-fifty).
Advising Project in Design Thinking
Team members: Aaron Brown, Paige McKean, Thanh Nguyen
Faculty advisors: Michelle Johnson (Communication) and Alison Schmidt (Education)
Project Description: The goal for the team was to use a design thinking model to provide information regarding how to improve the advising process at The College of Wooster so that students cultivate the Graduate Qualities. Following the design thinking model, the team conducted interviews with faculty, staff, and students to begin to identify common themes with the advising process. Themes from these interviews served as the basis for a survey that was sent to the entire College of Wooster student body. After reviewing data from the survey in conjunction with interview responses and personal reflection, the team identified the main challenges with the current advising process at Wooster and provided recommendations to overcome those challenges. Along with a final report detailing their process and conclusions, the team also compiled an annotated bibliography of sources relating to the design thinking process. The team’s work will be the basis for the future development of a new online advising tool.
Improving Revenue Forecasting and Creating a Capacity Forecasting Model
Team members: James Bai, Efua Bainson, Aidan Brown, Conor Maley
Faculty advisors: Dr. Drew Pasteur & Dr. Matthew Moynihan (Math)
Project Description: ArtiFlex Manufacturing produces replacement automobile parts. The AMRE team was hired by ArtiFlex to create a capacity forecasting model as well as improve the existing revenue forecasting model. These models are designed to help ArtiFlex make predictions about future business opportunities and expansion needs. Using Excel, the team refined the user interface and created additional data management features in the revenue forecasting model. The capacity forecasting model was designed to have a user friendly layout and a color coded warning system for machines that are near or over capacity. To estimate how much capacity has been used, the model automatically calculates the hours needed to complete different contracts, and compares these values to the total possible hours per month. Predictions become more accurate as more data becomes available on a certain contract.
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Analysis
Team members: Spencer Gilbert, Kayleigh Marks, Emily Partika
Faculty advisors: Peter Abramo, Entrepreneurship and Brett Woodard, Experiential Learning
Project Description: The College of Wooster’s Center for Entrepreneurship initiated a project in 2016 to develop a plan to build a sustainable college-community entrepreneurial ecosystem. Based on preliminary research conducted, the team accomplished the project objective by developing a plan to create an active, interconnected local ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship and ties The College into various elements provided by community institutions. After researching, conducting interviews with local entrepreneurs, and attending the Deshpande Symposium at UMass Lowell, the team developed project ideas to implement at The College of Wooster and proposed them at the end of the eight-week period. The following are a sample of their ideas: a new group they referred to as “IDEA” (Innovation and Development of the Entrepreneurial Arts); an entrepreneurial living learning community; and a consulting course that would represent a lesser capacity of the AMRE consulting program, and would be tied to a class for credit.
Student activity data for experiential and student affairs assessment
Team members: JoJo Tang, Jena Styka, Lissette Torres
Faculty advisors: Dr. John Ramsay (EL) and Missy Schen (Assessment)
Project Description: The Experiential Learning team was tasked with three deliverables to help The College of Wooster rethink the way experiential learning (EL) is talked about and assessed on campus. First, we created a common definition of EL, which we hope will help unite the College in thinking about EL as a campus-wide goal. Second, we developed a framework for the College to use to talk about an EL experience and to assess the value it has on student development. Lastly, we investigated how the College could track student involvement in co-curriculars. These deliverables can help the College improve EL on campus, as well as help with student development, marketing, retention, and alumni engagement.
OTR Mine Site Severity Index
Team Members: Jacob Denbeaux, Colby Jeffries, Robin Morillo, Rahab Wangari
Faculty Advisors: Drew Pasteur and Robert Wooster (Math)
Project Description: The goal of this project was to build an off the road (OTR) tire performance prediction model. Because OTR tires are expensive, Goodyear wanted to know how well tires will perform at a particular mine site before selling them to the mine site owners. The AMRE team received 6 data sets containing GPS data from various mine sites as well as supplemental information about the mine sites. The final result of this project was a mine site analysis tool with a built-in prediction model created by the team. The mine site analysis tool helps the company compare tire performance in different mines, predict tire performance in future mine sites, and visualize the GPS data in new and useful ways.
Manufacturing Footprint vs. Market Share Optimization
Team members: Makafui Fie, Brian Foley, Nan Jiang, Yunjia Zeng
Faculty advisors: Jennifer Bowen and Matt Moynihan (Math)
Project Description: The goal of our project is to summarize, classify, and visualize all the data files that The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company provided in May 2016, in order to help them with their retread business. We were given several Microsoft Excel files containing data about Goodyear owned and Goodyear authorized retreading plants. We were also given some competitor data, and a sample of truck fleet data in Florida.
Our project has two main deliverables:
A web application that reads data from files and projects the data onto a map. The map must be interactive, easy to use, and show data in such a way that conclusions can be easily drawn from the map.
A database in Microsoft Access that contains all of the original data provided, which is organized and easy to maintain, and fits the structure of Goodyear’s data.
Competitor Analysis
Team members: Gina Lam, Ayeley Commodore Mensah, Tyson Vogel, Claire Vu
Faculty advisors: John Ramsay and Ronda Kirsch (Math)
Project Description: Progressive Insurance’s Competitive Intelligence (CI) Team was interested in exploring how competitive their 2015 auto insurance quotes were against four particular competitors . The College of Wooster AMRE Team was provided with four main competitor .csv files along with 6 additional .csv files which included: Coverage Response Table 1, Coverage Response Table 2, Driver Table, Vehicle Table, Violation Table and Quomation Violation Table. In addition to those ten files, the team was provided with a glossary that listed all of the variables contained in each file along with instructions for merging each file. Various forms of analysis were used to evaluate Progressive’s competitiveness:
- Logistic regression
- Multivariate head to head analysis
- Variation of winning percentage by area or over time
- Performance vs. multiple carriers
- Quote mix
Each of these methods offered different insight into Progressive’s competitiveness and the variables that had an effect on it.
Predicting Retention: Systematic Approach to Assessing Student Retention Probability
Team members: Jack Marousek, Abbey Partika, Unnati Singhania
Faculty advisor: Dr. Brian Karazsia (Academic Advising & Psychology)
Project Description: The AMRE Retention team worked to identify variables that could improve retention prediction at The College of Wooster. A mixed method approach was used which included conducting a literature search and having departmental meetings. They recommended that the College switch to a mechanical or systematic method of predicting retention instead of a clinical approach attributed, which is prone to human error. Non-academic predictor variables were the focus of the report which was backed by empirical data. The report also contained a series of measurements for the variables. These measurements can be implemented in the future to collect accurate data and generate a systematic equation in to predict the likelihood of a student leaving the College before graduation.
Digital Archiving for Online Museum
Team members: Anna Claspy, Theresa Dunn, Heather Smith
Faculty advisors: Katie Holt and Madonna Hettinger, History
Project Description: Dr. Anthony Tizzano, an Ob/Gyn for the Cleveland Clinic, owns a collection of over 2400 gynecological and obstetrical antiques. He hopes to bring this collection to a wider audience and provide a resource for the history of women’s health. Dr. Tizzano hired a research team with digital history expertise to help organize and curate a digital museum to display his collection. For a nominal fee, site visitors can download high-resolution PowerPoint slides for lectures or personal use. Dr. Tizzano provided us with PowerPoint files from which we created individual PowerPoint presentation files for each object. SquareSpace provided a user-friendly platform on which we could easily create click-through pages and add images. On SquareSpace, we created section and subsection pages for the collections. We created product pages to display individual objects and allow patrons to click for further information. Interested patrons can choose to “Add to Cart,” which allows them to purchase a PowerPoint presentation that includes more information on the object, access to the image, and references. Drawing on our experience with multimedia composition, we took on an additional project of creating e-books that patrons can purchase for a higher price, but with more content and information.
Data Mining Automation for Auto Insurance Data
Team members: Scarlett Chen, Khoa Nguyen, Ralph Xu
Faculty advisors: Dr. Jennifer Bowen & Dr. Robert Wooster (Math)
Project Description: The goal of this AMRE project for Western Reserve Group is to automate the process of data extraction from Microsoft Access into Excel and to structure the data appropriately for future analysis in tracking losses and setting premium rates. We are given several Access tables and two Excel files that contain the necessary data and calculations for auto insurance. By creating new queries to establish the data connections between Access and Excel, and configuring the calculations to adapt to the dynamic data, users can now interact with the data in the Excel files directly, hence increasing the ease and efficiency of their work.