Table of Contents

Over the summer, I had the opportunity to attend Wharton Global Youth’s data science academy. This blog post is about my experiences with the program, my overall thoughts on these kinds of programs, and the things I learned both about class and about myself as a person.

What is the Wharton Global Youth Data Science Academy?

The data science academy (DSA) is part of the greater Wharton global youth ecosystem, in which high school students can come to University of Pennsylvania’s campus and study various subjects. A lot of colleges tend to have similar programs. From the college’s viewpoint, it’s a good source of revenue, and from a student’s viewpoint, it’s a good opportunity to explore what college would be like on campus.

DSA is the brainchild of Wharton Professor Linda Zhao who took her course “Modern Data Mining” and adapted it into a 3-week program for high school students. The main structure of the program is:

Week 1: Statistics basics + R programing basics + Linear Regression

Week 2: Multiple Linear Regression + Logarithmic Regression

Week 3: Neural Networks + Tree based models + Final Presentation

The goal of the program is to take an undergraduate level class and provide a way for highschoolers to get exposed to the subject and potentially what a college class in that subject would be like.

My Overall Opinions

I’ve taken 2 Wharton Global Youth so far. In the summer of sophomore year (rising junior) I took the Essentials of Entrepreneurship course. This summer I participated in DSA.

Thoughts on Essentials of Entrepreneurship (EOE)

Unlike DSA, EOE is a 2-week program. The main content taught is around how to create a good product that has fits a demand in the market. There wasn’t much focus given to how to scale a business, which I know came as a disappointment to some of my classmates.

As a student who was interested in business at the time, I’d say that attending the Wharton program helped me get a better idea of what business is like. At the same time, just with the way the program is set up, there isn’t too much that can be accomplished in 2 weeks. The program goes at a fast pace that pushes you to innovate and learn, but also doesn’t give enough time to fundamentals. Despite that, I still believe that it’s a good introductory experience to business.

I enjoyed the final project in EOE. Each Wharton program does their own end of program project. For EOE, we were challenged with creating a hypothetical startup. Granted my group didn’t do as well on it as we would’ve wanted, there were plenty of learning opportunities. Up until that point I hadn’t participated in a hackathon/design sprint kind of event, so it was a unique learning experience. In preparation for our final project, I made a figma website. If you told me that in a span of 3 days, I’d learn how to create and make a website front-end I would have called BS, but that’s what happened. I think the environment overall pushed me to learn new skills and get out of my comfort zone.

Thoughts on Data Science Academy (DSA)

Comparatively speaking, DSA was a much better experience than EOE. I’d probably say there were a couple factors that made me feel that way. For starters, I connected more with students in DSA, in general they seemed to be easier to talk to. Secondly, I enjoyed learning data science a bit more, and since the program lasted for 3 weeks, I was able to learn more. Finally, the professors and teaching assistants felt more involved in DSA. Every year for EOE they swap out which professor teaches it. Meanwhile in DSA, every year it’s taught by the same professor. Just as a student, it felt that DSA’s professor was much more personally involved in teaching the content and making sure that we as students learned.

In terms of the content, I’d say it was pretty much what I expected, the class was fast paced, the content was relevant and felt like other classes I’d taken albeit a bit harder. In the span of 3 weeks, I went from not knowing any statistics (at this point I’ve focused on calculus in high school) to having a good understanding of the fundamentals and decent knowledge of models. One thing I really liked was that Professor Zhao and the teaching assistants are very particular about the wording. While being annoying at the beginning, it certainly made sure that I had the precise definition.

I think that the course gives you enough basic knowledge that you’d be able to progress on your own. The course teaches u enough of the basics where if you have further interests in areas like neural networks, you’d be well prepared to understand what’s going on. Some concepts aren’t really explained in class like back propagation, but the basic concepts like minimizing cost functions are included. From there it’s possible to study those higher-level concepts and understand them.

The DSA final project was a group project that analyzes some issue in the world and based on that issue, try to think of some potential solutions. At the end, we participated in DSL (Data Science Live) 8, where we presented our findings.

Thoughts on Final Presentation and DSL8

My group ended up choosing the task of analyzing violent crime in US counties. In class before, we had looked at a violent crime data set from 1995. To update her materials, Professor Zhao asked if any groups were interested in taking on the task of modernizing that data set. At the time, we didn’t really have any other better idea, so we decided to take on the challenge.

For our final dataset, we ended up taking a bunch of data from sources over the internet. If you’re curious, we uploaded everything our group did to our project GitHub.

In terms of pacing, our group felt like we had a decent amount of time to get things done, but I do know of many classmates who were up late the night before DSL preparing the final presentations. Everything tends to be fast paced, but there’s definitely enough time to both learn and do activities. Overall, I think the group presentation was a fun journey with both ups and downs. In the moment I overstressed though.

DSL 8 was quite fun to be a part of. Watching everyone present their various findings was both gratifying and inspiring. Most people hadn’t had any formal data science experience before the program, and in a period of 3 weeks, they’d done some analysis on real world data.

Personal Growth

Perhaps a little self-reflective, but I think it’s helpful to share the things that I’ve learned as a person through this program.

What I Learned as a Person

A bit cliche, but I’ve discovered how much we can accomplish if we really put our mind to doing something. For example, the final project seemed like an impossible task initially (hence the overstressing), but everything worked out. Reading the course syllabus and the content covered in the class was daunting, but as the course progressed it became more and more manageable. For the final group Figma project, our group thought of the idea at the last minute, and we weren’t sure if we’d be able to finish in time. Yet in the end, I was able to create the entire Figma in one day. I’d like to say that one of the biggest takeaways has been discovering the ability to accomplish a lot, even if we doubt it ourselves.

Not only has the Penn course taught me about the possibilities when working hard, it’s also shown me a lot about taking advantage of opportunities. I agree that being presented with opportunities comes down to a certain degree of luck, after all, most of the opportunities that we get are presented to us. Our actions are based on taking advantage of the opportunities that we’re given. With that as a given, I also believe in the importance of maximizing the chance at getting opportunities. Things like putting ourselves out there, volunteering in class, paying attention to others all present the potential to get create opportunities. Even if it’s mostly left up to luck, we still have an opportunity to put ourselves in a position to get lucky.

The Penn Program has pushed me to put myself out there a bit more and to really maximize the chances that I got. One example is in learning from classmates. While it might be convenient to just stick to yourself in class, there’s a lot to be learned by interacting with classmates and learning from them. I’ve had the opportunity to make some great friends that way, whom we still talk to even after the program has ended.

What I Learned as a Leader

The biggest thing I learned as a group leader is how to take advantage of the skills other people have. In school, groups projects often consist of people with roughly the same skill sets. If it’s making a presentation, the task is more a division of labor than it is a problem of optimizing everyone’s skills. Furthermore, in school, most people aren’t the most motivated. People tend to see group work as a chore that they just need to “get over with”. As such, my previous group work didn’t feel like a group working together. Sure, we had to divide up the work, but everyone could largely all do the same things, we never had to fully rely on someone else. If a group member didn’t do their part, the others could always cover for them. This time at the Wharton program, our group’s task seemed, at least on the outside, to be something complex. In a period of 1.5 weeks, we had to go from nothing, to finding data sets, combining, and cleaning them to creating a model to finally presenting our findings. I’ll be the first to admit that my skills alone couldn’t accomplish this task. My experience with R or the pandas package in python wasn’t nearly enough to even finish the first two steps. For this group presentation, I had to rely on the various skills of my group mates. For example, one group member had lots of previous experience with the python pandas package. He took charge of cleaning the data set. I think the challenge was partially dividing up the work and taking advantage of the individual skills that people had, but also trusting them. In previous group work, I’ve always been afforded the luxury of being able to verify for myself that the work’s been done up to scratch. In this project, my group had skills that I didn’t have. As such, in part I had to trust them in their ability.

Having taken that leap of faith, I think my group did a phenomenal job. Towards the end, we all had different areas that we were focusing on, while collaborating to see if we needed to work together on some tasks. The entire process really showed me the power of a group environment where you have a bunch of people with different skills.

Advice to Others Applying to Wharton Global Youth Programs

This section is more targeted at other highschoolers who are looking to get into the Wharton Global Youth summer program. While being selective (I believe that programs like Leadership in the Business World have around 20% acceptance rate, this year for data science it was around 18%) I’d say it’s doable. Other than the general advice of starting essays early/revising essays, I’d say that approaching the program with an open mind and finding one that really matches your pursuits is what really matters. In my experience, I’ve met a ton of intelligent, smart people in both years that have inspired me to become better. I think the biggest thing that I gained from attending the program was just being part of an environment where people push you to learn and become a better version of yourself. Even if the place isn’t at Wharton over the summer, pursue a place that pushes you.

As a word of caution, I know a lot of people who did these programs, wanted to do it as a method of boosting their college admissions chances. I would recommend against this, as from the things I’ve seen and from the things I’ve read, attending a Wharton global youth program doesn’t do much in the way of helping you in college. When talking to the admission officers at UPenn, they’ve largely expressed that they don’t care if you attend. If you think that the program will add value to you as a person in your own academic pursuits, I’d recommend going for it. If you want to explore UPenn’s campus over the summer, I’d recommend going for it. But don’t treat it as your golden ticket into one of the World’s best undergraduate business programs.

Conclusion

I’ve had fun at Wharton these past 2 summers. I’ve had a lot of fun memories of meeting some great people and learning some great things. When I first started learning about these programs, I didn’t see many resources out there about them. For the most part, they felt like a small subsect of Wharton that was sort of largely ignored. I hope to shed some light on one way for you or someone you may know to spend your summer. If you do decide that the program is right for you and do apply, please let me know how it goes. My blog should have my email on it.