 Just myself, my name is Eva Pardo Keegan. I'm the peer advisor for computer science engineering and I'm a junior computer science engineer right now and today we're joined by MDST. Do you guys want to introduce yourself? Maybe you're a major and then your role in MDST? Yeah, for sure. So I'm Josh, I'm a senior in computer science. I've been with MDST since I want to say winter 2021 and I'm president club. I'm Lucy. I'm majoring in CS and BCN and I think this is my fourth semester with MDST and I am the external VP. Okay, awesome. And then just to get started, could you talk briefly about, I guess, like a general introduction of what is MDST for people who might not have heard it, heard of it, what it stands for? And then maybe if you can go into, you know, the types of majors and the people in the organization. Yeah, so MDST is sort of from Michigan data science team. We are the biggest and we like to think best applied data science and machine learning club on campus. We have over 200 active members working together on a range of projects every semester and we, our goals are mainly to sort of educate about the applications of data science and ML. Give people sort of the tools to start a career in the field and also provide opportunities for members, professional, academic and career development through talks and corporate sponsorships and things like that. Great. You mentioned that, you know, you host events with different types of events. Are they usually more social or professional or like a mix of them? Can you talk about maybe some different types of events that you host? Yeah, Lucy, you want to take us? Yeah. So we have our weekly meeting sessions, which are our three hour blogs where we actually work on projects and it's a chance for our members to improve their technical skills. But we also do have a variety of social, professional and outreach events. So these are Thursday meetings where we do social such as like trivia or jeopardy. And then we also have professional and networking events where we invite companies in and they can give tech talks and talk about the latest AI or data science projects that they're developing and it gives our members a chance to get a glimpse of what industry looks like with data science. Cool. Are there specific dates that events are hosted on or they just like hosted on different, I guess, like throughout the month. So, generally, we try to have them in line with our kind of Thursday meeting schedule, but it's at the end of the day up to whoever's actually giving the presentations for us. But yeah, just kind of add on to Lucy's point there. I just want to highlight a couple of like it kind of more noteworthy talks we've had. So like last semester, we had a like the head of the AI department at Bloomberg come give a talk about sort of the infrastructure at that company and sort of like again, what machine learning and data science looks like at Bloomberg. This Thursday actually we have a researcher from OpenAI coming to talk about sort of his work on reinforcement learning and things like that and how they developed chat GPT. That's really cool. There's a lot of great opportunities and that's awesome. And then can you talk a little bit about the time commitment if the members have to attend every single event or, you know, if it's just a couple events or what the time commitment is, I guess. Yeah, so we have three hour work sessions on Sunday and those are mandatory in order for members to keep up with the projects. But we do allow for one absence, I think. And then in terms of Thursday meetings, which are social and like networking events. Those are optional, but they again are great opportunities for members to get to know each other and get to see what our sponsors are doing. And then with that too, could I ask how has it been for both of you managing that with your own classes, you know, being on projects and stuff. How have you found it to be? Yeah, so I personally found it really not to interfere that much with my schedule. I mean, the 3 hours on Sunday, you know, if it's something that you want to do is definitely time that you can find. We also offer opportunities for people to move up to be project leads and that also tends to be similar like a similar time commitment and people seem to not have issues scheduling alongside their schoolwork. Yeah, I've also found the 3 hours do not be too bad. And also, like, you meet a lot of people in your classes at MDST and so you can take time to like talk about the homework or projects you're doing. We also do provide food or a lot of meetings. So it's kind of a win-win essentially the time you're taking for lunch. That's awesome. And then can you talk a little bit about the different projects that you have? And then we'll go into the process to join them. But I think in overview, the projects would be cool. Yeah, for sure. So every semester we split up into about 10 to 15 different projects given that we have 200 plus members. We tend to get to split up into a lot of groups for that. And we try to kind of balance them between sort of more beginner projects to get people who are more interested in joining the field and sort of stepping into the club, you know, seeing what data science machine learning is like. Maybe freshman who have an LLF coding background. And then we also have some more advanced projects. So, for instance, this semester we're doing one where we're sort of rebuilding Dali, which if you're familiar, it's one of the sort of image generation AIs that have been making a lot of waves recently. And we're also trying to branch out into slightly different sort of aspects of machine learning and data science. So, in addition to these projects that involve these kind of complex models like Dali, we also have a project on web scraping, which is important part of data science. And we also have a project on like ML engineering, which is a very like an emerging field that's like growing really fast. And we have a project that involves sort of building and hosting a chat bot in an ML engineering kind of frame of reference. And we also have this year for the first time, we're doing sponsored project where we work with partners from industry to sort of put together a project that is impactful both for us and for our partners. That's great. You briefly mentioned this to a little bit, but what type of experience do people need to have, you know, to join the projects? Does it depend on the project or can anyone join? Yeah, we, so in terms of joining our club, we are open to everybody in order to join. All you really need to do is complete a checkpoint, which is just a very brief like evaluation of like Python, NumPy, Pandas. But we do offer a lot of assistance and like office hours and tutorials. If you're not so experienced with those. And then in terms of joining our projects, we do have like each member ranks their preference for projects and we do our best to try to match them to the project that they want and also like fits their level of expertise at the time. Perfect. Thank you. And then before you had mentioned, you have different companies that come and talk, you had Bloomberg and come and talk, which is awesome. What type of professional opportunities would you say members gain at these events and stuff? So it varies event to event. So sometimes it's mainly a way for the company to come advertise itself and come talk to like a group of motivated people looking to join the field. But a lot of times we also people get like specific application links and that help you through the application process give you a bit of a leg up. It's also, of course, always useful to be able to mention a recruiter's name when you're applying. So even just showing up to these presentations is useful for people professional development like that. But we also have certain talks that are more directly impactful. So for instance, right before spring break, we had a talk by a guy called Nick Singh, who wrote, we literally wrote the book on data science interviews. And so he sort of really course of the meetings or talked us through like the way the best ways to sort of prepare for an interview and best ways to show your chances of scoring at your job that you want. It sounds like really great networking experience too. That's really cool. And then you also mentioned earlier of talking a little bit about team leads, project team leads. Could you talk about some leadership opportunities and like kind of how those happen? Yes. So we're, we're a pretty big club. So we do have a lot of projects and then a lot of project leads. And we are always looking for more project leads. You don't have to be like super experienced in ML or data science to be a project lead. It's also a really great learning opportunity. But besides project leads, we also have like our committees. So we have like social committee or finance committee project committee. And so these students all work on developing the tutorials in order to join the club as well as developing projects and like social opportunities, things like that. So we do have quite a lot of opportunities and we are always looking for people to take on these roles. We also have a fairly large eboard. We have sick numbers, I think, kind of covering a really diverse array of responsibilities. And so, yeah, and of course, as Lucy said, we have a really kind of wide base for leadership with the, with the number of project leads that we have. So there's a lot of opportunities to get involved and a lot of opportunities to move up to the structure if you're interested. And then switching gears here. I also wanted to ask about any fundraising events that you might have in coming up and then if you could talk a little bit about them. Yeah, so naturally being a fairly large club as we are. And with that, since we don't have dues because we try to sort of lower the barriers to entry to the field. We have a lot of costs and we need to find ways to cover them. And so this year we are participating in giving Blue Day, which is next Wednesday. And yeah, essentially if you're interested in sort of contributing to the club and sort of helping support us in what we do, we, yeah, we appreciate any gifts that people will be willing to send over to us. Our giving page is at tiny URL dot com slash M D S T dash blue day. So check that out if you're interested in giving. Yeah, again, we appreciate it. Perfect. Well, make sure to the link, giving the day in our link tree as well so people can find you more easily there too. That's great. And then we talked a little bit about joining the teams. But is there a specific way to people, if you talk a little bit more about that, and maybe how competitive it is to join teams. Yeah, so we don't have like, it's not really competitive more so we just have a lot of people so sometimes people don't always get their number one choice. But we do try our best to give everybody the project that they're most interested in. And again, we don't, we try to lower the barriers of barriers of entry. So anybody who really wants to join the club should be able to and they should be able to get onto a project that they have interest in. Cool. And just to like add some specific dates and stuff to that we accept new members at the start of each semester. So if you're interested in joining, check on our website M D S T dot club. Around the start of the coming fall semester and you'll see the opportunity sort of to get involved there. And then you mentioned that you have an event coming up this Thursday. I believe you said, are there any other events that you maybe want to mention that are coming up as well that people can attend. Well, we do try to do talks as often as we can on Thursdays. This is the one that we have coming up now. I believe we have one in two weeks by a former and the president who's now gone on to start a number of startups successfully in Silicon Valley. I believe he's coming again to Thursdays from this coming Thursday. So, yeah, again, more information probably on our website. Cool. And then just to wrap up my last question. I just want to ask both of you, what your favorite thing or your favorite memory has been from M D S T. Yeah, I would say my favorite thing is just getting to meet a lot of people that share your same interests. It's a great way to like learn from other people, but also find friends and like your classes and people to work with. Yeah, I definitely have to agree with Lucy. I also think one thing I really enjoyed was being a project lead a year and a half ago or so. So it really sort of accelerated my understanding of the topic that I was working on and really made me more confident. That's what I, some of that want to do my career. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. That was a great overview of M D S T. And we'll make sure to link the giving blue day and our link tree and then we'll also put the link to your website so people can find. But thank you so much for joining us and have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Thanks for having us.