Welcome to the second installment of our University Club winner interviews!
Today’s university students are tomorrow’s leading data scientists. That's the catalyst for Kaggle University Club — a virtual community and Slack channel for existing data science clubs who want to compete in Kaggle competitions together. As our end-of-year event for 2018, we hosted our first-ever University Hackathon.
18 total kernels were submitted and the three top-scoring teams won exclusive Kaggle swag and an opportunity to be featured here, on No Free Hunch. Please enjoy this profile from one of the top-scoring university teams, ‘Team 5 top 100’ fromPeople Frienship University of Russia (RUDN)!
To read more about the Hackathon and its grading criteria, see Winter ‘18 Hackathon. To read this team’s winning kernel, visit: Team 5 top 100: Predicting Review Scores Using Neural Networks
MEET THE STUDENTS
Major: Computer Science
Hometown: Donetsk, Ukraine
Anticipated graduation: Summer 2020
What brought you to data science?
At school I fell in love with Python, so in university I decided to try to develop a site on Django. It was kinda boring, so I started to learn data science instead. I wrote a class project on bank scoring and five additional projects just for fun. After that I joined ODS and earned a top 25 place in one text classification competition. Later, I began Deep Learning on CS231n and CS224n, won some money in a hackathon, and a bronze medal in the Kaggle Toxic Classification Challenge. In the summer I started working as a ML researcher at the start-up where I currently work.
What are your career aspirations after graduation?
I want to work at least one year in California, Japan and Europe as a ML researcher or engineer.
Major: Fundamental Computer Science and IT
Hometown: Volzhskiy, Russia
What brought you to data science?
Originally, I dreamed about designing systems which help people in need. My first project was about analyzing tweets. I read a lot about NLP, classification problems and some general ML stuff. Since then, I've done a course project on ML and got an offer for a part-time job in NLP lab in a research institute. There, we are working on different projects, from analyzing ecological situation by tweets to working with people's essays.
What are your career aspirations?
I'm really enjoying research and I'd like to be research engineer.
Major: Fundamental Computer Science and IT
Hometown: Kaluga, Russia
What brought you to data science?
I simply want a well-paying job, so that led me here. 
What are your career aspirations?
I would like to work as machine learning engineer at a startup.
Katherine Lozhenko
Major: Fundamental Math and IT
Hometown: Moscow, Russia
What brought you to data science?
My dream of world dominance.
What are your career aspirations?
To be a research engineer would be the most interesting job I can think of.
Rustem Zalyalov
Major: Computer Science
Hometown: Niznekamsk, Russia
What brought you to data science?
Whole my life I was interested in computer graphics and computer vision, so I took cs231n and started to participate in different hackathons like this with my friends from Confederation (our club name). Also I am working at Russian Academy of Science as researcher.
What are your career aspirations?
I don’t know what I want exactly, but I want to get interesting and well-paying projects.
TEAM QUESTIONS
How familiar was your team with Kaggle competitions prior to the Hackathon?
Pretty familiar. A year ago three of us, Stas, Daniil and Rustem, earned bronze medal in the Toxic Classification Challenge. We also participated in a huge number of other playground competitions, mainly for T-shirts and swag.
How did your team work together on your Kernel?
We worked independently on different parts. Someone researched science field (found different papers on arXiv.org), another one of us wrote the explanation, someone else visualized and analyzed the non-text data, someone prepossessed texts and fir models, and another one served as project manager for everything.
What was the most challenging part of the hackathon for you?
We had experience in this field, so the hardest part was managing and collecting everything into one kernel.
What surprised you most about the competition?
We didn’t face any surprises. Being well-organized helped a lot.
What advice would you give another student who wanted to compete in a Kaggle competition or even a hackathon?
If you want to win on Kaggle, just start to participate! Explore kernels and read discussions. Google anything you don’t understand, find friends to compete with and join any data science community, like this University Club or ods.ai.
Anything else?
Thanks for this cool hackathon! It will help us to improve data science and computer science in our university. We feel like we can motivate students for more intensive learning and influence the administration to continue supporting us.
Awesome job, team!