Project goals
Washington University in St. Louis is looking for an intern to help develop new approaches to Ph.D. student recruitment. Its Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences (DBBS) is the umbrella organization supporting interdisciplinary graduate education in the biosciences. It serves nearly 700 students and a similar number of faculty affiliated with DBBS. One of its core functions is admissions, where a key goal is to recruit a target number of students for each of 13 graduate programs without exceeding an overall threshold. DBBS is aiming to transition to a more informatics-driven process of forecasting returns to better manage the number and timing of offers to applicants.
Project approach
Tim Holy, a Julia developer and Professor of Neuroscience, started the project by creating a core set of analytic and forecasting routines. There are two urgent needs: (1) to integrate the analytics with DBBS’s existing SQL database for real-time access to data, and (2) to develop browser-based visualizations of the forecasts to assist DBBS staff in final decision-making. There may also be opportunities to improve or extend the existing analytics.
Project details
The intern will be paid $15/hr and have the opportunity to be coached in Julia development by Tim. The project is on a tight timeline and must be ready to roll out, at least in preliminary form, by late December 2021.