The Senior-Year Experience Where the Major Meets the Real World

Not long before graduation, every major in UT Statistics and Data Science winds up in the same course: a semester-long team project built on real data from a real client. “Case Studies in Data Science,” taught by Associate Professor of Instruction Su Chen, asks students to pull together everything they have learned and apply it to a challenge from industry or the public sector. The course culminates with each team delivering a formal presentation, a written report and a software or data code base. 

“This is not a typical course where you do your homework and then I grade you based on the solutions,” says Chen. “I don’t have the solution. We’re in this together.” Students must figure out ways to scope a problem, wrangle imperfect data, test approaches and explain results, much as they will in their professional lives.  

What’s more, as this capstone experience attracts new partners, students are increasingly able to see their work evaluated and even adopted. For students, that is the most exciting draw. “It’s just been an awesome experience to be able to work with real-world data where we have the opportunity to make an impact on an actual company,” says SDS student Henry Blake, whose team is working this fall with Austin-based Realtor.com. 

One Semester, One Project 

Chen’s course is required for graduation and runs every fall and spring. It debuted this spring, the semester that SDS’s first undergraduate class graduated. From this year on, roughly 150 seniors will take it each year in sections capped at about 50. Students work in teams of five and commit at least 10 hours a week outside class to a single project. 

The first month resembles a traditional class. Before diving in, Chen lectures on topics like designing a data science pipeline, validating it in the real world, ethics and interpretable machine learning. After that, class time belongs to the teams. They give regular progress updates, receiving feedback from Chen and, at key milestones, from the partner organization itself. “Everything is structured around project-based and team-based learning,” Chen says. 

The course welcomes partners in industry, government, nonprofits or university research, who supply data and a question. Chen helps shape the project to fit a semester, since real-world problems are often vague or sprawling or may involve sensitive or proprietary data. When partners are scarce, teams may propose their own projects using public data.  

From Police Stops to Home Searches 

The inaugural Spring 2026 class had no outside sponsor, so every team worked from the Stanford Open Policing Project, a public database of traffic and pedestrian stops from major U.S. cities that researchers use to study policing patterns. Each team chose a city, added its own supplemental data, such as traffic records or census demographics, and asked its own question. Does enforcement relate to traffic outcomes? Do political policies change police behavior? Do major sporting events shift who gets stopped? 

This fall, the class has its first real client. Realtor.com connects home buyers with real estate agents and earns revenue when a new visitor shares contact information with the site – to a realtor, a lead. The company aims to get better at predicting which users will submit a lead within 30 days of visiting the site. Only about 1.2 percent of visitors do, a rare-events problem that machine learning algorithms can struggle to solve. Chen turned the project into a competition to see which student team’s model performs best. 

Everything the Major Teaches, in One Experience 

Chen sorts what SDS majors learn into three buckets: knowledge, skills and tools. Knowledge includes statistics and machine learning concepts needed to translate a messy business or research question into a solvable one. Tools means programming in R or Python and building reproducible models. Skills are the human side, which she says students rarely get enough practice with: communicating, collaborating, presenting to audiences with no technical background and managing a project against a deadline. 

“They need to use everything they learn in the major in this course,” Chen says. “It’s the perfect wrap-up of their study.” 

Preparation for the First Job 

The course grew from something Chen and her colleagues kept hearing from students, who came back from internships and research projects saying there was a gap between what they learned in the classroom and what the work demanded. “I wanted to design this course to bridge that gap as much as possible,” she says.  

For students embarking on the job market, there are multiple payoffs. Class of 2026 BS graduate and current SDS PhD candidate Berkeley Ho describes the capstone experience as instilling “the confidence that you can use this [knowledge] and build a career in this, early on.” Even more, graduates leave the course with a team-built, documented code repository, a written report and a presentation delivered to peers and, increasingly, to a company sponsor. Those are artifacts they can point to in the job interview process.  

Growing a Model that Works, through Partnerships 

The capstone’s biggest challenge ahead is scale. About 150 seniors will soon need this course every year, and, for now, Chen is its only instructor. “How do we scale this course up to have 150 students every year, and where do we get all the projects?” she asks. “It’s still a work in progress.”  

Partners and donors will play a key role in shaping the next decade of the program. Chen’s hope is that the SDS community will rally to help bring more sponsors and projects into the classroom and to add faculty, so seniors get more individual attention.  

“This class is a really good stepping point,” says SDS student Samhitha Kunadharaju, “but it’d be so much more interesting to have even more sponsors, even more really interesting projects, just more real-world data that we can do more projects with.” After all, every new project gives another team of students a chance to find out what they are really capable of. 

Learn more about this month’s Hornraiser campaign supporting experiential learning at SDS.