The senior project experience so far has been nothing short of the best I could have hoped for. I have learned so much about football, been given remarkable amounts of access to innovative sports models, and have begun to push myself more. Being involved with Big League Advance has shown me many new things in the world of analytics, advanced predictive modeling, and sports in general. Much of what Big League Advance does is incredibly advanced, and the number of files that exist in the software is outstanding. 

While I don’t come in for school very often, my schedule remains very busy, which I have found to be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I am forced into a specific time window, from 9 AM to 2:30 PM, and can log additional hours at night if I want to. On the other hand, if I’m not productive during that first window, I can fall behind quickly, which is something I definitely don’t want happening to me during this internship. This schedule has helped me stay focused, and remove all distractions while I work on the various projects I have been assigned.

I have started to create my own codes in R, dig through spreadsheets searching for common trends of the predictive model, and been allowed to share my own thoughts and findings with some of the smartest people I have ever met. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect entering this internship — it is the first one I have ever had, but it has been amazing. The team has been very supportive and responsive for me, and I couldn’t imagine a better first internship to have. Going forward, I’m super eager to continue to help Big League Advance out in as many ways as I can, but hope to continue browsing through the various sets of data they have, and continue to manipulate them to best collect my own information to give back. So far, I have gained much insight into how a company such as Big League Advance runs its daily operations, and have learned about softwares such as AWS, Slack, and TablePlus. It has barely been a week, yet I feel like I have done so much already. 

Moving forward, I hope to continue working on all the different subsections of BLA that I’ve worked on. The advanced datasets have been something that I have especially been interested in and hope that I will continue to work with the Super Bowl set, and begin moving on to other games to find more trends. This experience has been very enriching, and I can’t wait to see where else this takes me.