Where Learning Meets Impact

From Data to Decisions

What happens when student work moves beyond the classroom and into the real-world? 

For Priya Shah, Olga Kinsafula Hamilton, and Leo Leone, this year's capstone project became one of the most formative experiences of their undergraduate careers. The three BSI seniors spent months working with the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, building interactive dashboards to track attendance trends, membership patterns, and donor behavior. What they carried out of it extends well beyond the deliverables.

Shah, who will join JPMorgan Chase as an Innovation Development Analyst, points to the demands of working with a live client as an inflection point. The project did not follow a fixed set of instructions, and it did not end with a submission. "I learned how to communicate with stakeholders actively and make changes that reflected their shifting priorities," she says, "which cannot be achieved in a traditional setting with rubrics set by classes."

Those shifts required the team to revisit decisions, reframe their thinking, and stay aligned with a client whose needs continued to evolve.

For Kinsafula Hamilton, that process clarified not only how she works, but why. "Seeing that the museum will use the dashboards to understand donors and plan better fundraising made me realize I want a career where I use data to make a real impact," she says. The dashboards were not built to demonstrate a concept. They were built to be used.

Leone, who is heading to FTI Consulting as a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) consultant, points to a different moment, not during development, but at EXPO itself. "In class, everyone already knows your project," he says. "At EXPO, you are explaining it to people who have no context." He adds that speaking in front of people and explaining high-stakes topics is something everyone will have to do at some point, and that getting reps early in college is crucial.

The project unfolded over the better part of an academic year, with regular client meetings, ongoing updates, and the expectation that progress would be shared and understood along the way. For Shah, that cadence became part of the preparation. "Having biweekly meetings with our clients, preparing presentations to discuss our work to others that may not be familiar with it, and giving informative updates has helped me feel prepared," she says.

Across all three reflections, the throughline is clear. The work was real, the client was real, and the stakes extended well beyond a grade. That is what UMSI is building toward: graduates who do not arrive at their first job wondering what professional work feels like, but able to excel because they have already done it.