Insider Insights: Meet Statistics & Data Science Major Parul Gupta

Parul Gupta stood on stage, beaming with joy as a representative from Major League Hacking placed a pin on her. Though the pin was small, it represented a big victory: Gupta and her team had just won second place out of more than 80 teams at UT San Antonio’s hackathon, RowdyHacks.

It’s moments like these when Gupta is especially proud to be part of the first class of statistics and data science (SDS) majors at The University of Texas at Austin. Gupta, a junior who is also minoring in entrepreneurship and pursuing the programming and computation certificate, shared how UT has helped her flourish both in and out of the classroom.

“I feel like my SDS major, even though it’s a technical degree and falls under the College of Natural Sciences, is actually one that is pretty interdisciplinary,” Gupta said. “We take classes where we consider ethical implementations of technology, and we also take classes that are hardcore mathematical and programming-based.”

Gupta’s interest in public health and statistics was piqued through competing in the Disease Detectives event in Science Olympiad as a high schooler. But while her career plans have evolved from becoming a doctor to instead pursuing data science, her passion for public health has continued. 

“As I grew older, I realized that patient care wasn’t the setting I wanted to go into, but I learned you could still use stats and programming to make an impact in the healthcare space,” Gupta said. “In fact, in my machine-learning class recently, we had to pick a paper and present on the types of machine-learning models that were used in a study, and I focused on a paper that was related to age-related macular degeneration.”

While her major has strengthened her technical skills, Gupta said it’s also enhanced her critical thinking. 

“Data is vague. It’s messy, and there’s no clear approach to handling it, which is why, whenever you make a decision with data, you have to make sure you have a solid reasoning,” Gupta said. “Since I’m so used to looking at different types of data sets, I’m very inquisitive.”

During her freshman year at UT, Gupta competed in a challenge called the DataFest at Southern Methodist University. During the competition, she and her team developed a way through which a company client could understand where their resources were currently being allocated and where they shouldn’t allocate more to prevent loss.

Though she and her friends were the youngest team at the competition, they drew on the tools they’d learned through their major, particularly a package called R Shiny. It offers a way to make web-based applications by extracting from data sets. 

“It was really rewarding when we placed in the top five for ‘Best Data Visualization,’” Gupta said. “It felt good to do meaningful work and know that all these ideas were actually being taken back to the company.” 

Last year, following the precedent Gupta and her team set, five teams of students from UT competed in the DataFest. Four of the five teams won top awards last year because the previous competitors were able to mentor them with their learnings.

“I feel that since I’m part of the initial batch of SDS, we started something that students can carry on,” Gupta said. 

While Gupta has found success in competitions hosted by other schools, she’s also made a mark at UT as part of the corporate team of Freetail Hackers, an organization that hosts two annual hackathons at UT. As part of the team, Gupta works on fundraising and recruiting sponsors for the hackathons. 

Gupta may have built a variety of skills through hackathons, but she said that her data science education was a powerful resource in itself, one she’ll carry throughout her career.

“The way I look at data science is as a tool to learn more about other things,” Gupta said. “If you’re a business-oriented person, data science is being used to help prevent business losses by predicting the success rate of something. If you’re interested in healthcare, you can use data science to analyze healthcare trends or disease transmission.”