Donna Dyer, Director of Career Services at Sanford School of Public Policy talked about advertising our DISI experience in resumes and job interviews. An interactive workshop was conducted on:

• How graduate students can “sell” their DISI or interdisciplinary project experience in general to potential employers
• Tips for using DISI and other extracurricular experiences in behavioral interviews were also discussed
  

Mr. Rajiv Dulepet and Dr. John Lee led an interactive workshop on the power of data and how it can help individuals, organizations, and leaders better identify and work on social problems. Rajiv Dulepet is an entrepreneur and founder of WiseWindow, and is currently an Advisory Managing Director at KPMG. Dr. John Lee is a data scientist at KPMG. Some key features of the event were:

• The event ended in a hackathon that involved students using big data to tackle a specific social problem
  
• The speakers walked the audience through the thought process on how to approach a problem from the perspective of data, citing some examples from KPMG clients
  
• Current project team members were given an opportunity to ask questions and ideas on how to incorporate data into their projects in the past semester
  

Prof. Bob Barnes conveyed the most important aspects of project management to the DISI community. Prof. Barnes has been consulting and traning managers for years, typically in a 1-week training session. He condensed his presentation to an hour to accomodate DISI students' schedule but was able to hit on some key takeaways:

• A project is temporary, based on outcome, and iterative
• Iterative process: requirements definition, work breakdown structure (list of actionable items), assessment of risk, estimation of target, scheduling (date-specific sequence of planned actions)
• Types of requirements: functional, constraint, and often unexpressed quality
• Top three reasons why projects fail: poor requirement specifications, lack of change control, or unavailability of key resources
• To motivate team members, let them know what is expected of them, if they can do it, and what's in it for them personally