Establishing an Industrial Engineering Internship Pipeline for Data Analysis Careers in Collegiate and Professional Athletics

This work in progress paper describes the development of an on-campus internship that offers industrial and systems engineering students the opportunity to explore their interests in both athletics and data analysis. With awareness of student interest as well as research interests in sensor data analysis in collegiate and professional athletics, authors seek to connect engineering students with their data analytics and/or sports interests by establishing internship opportunities with the on-campus athletics program. In Fall 2017, eleven industrial engineering undergraduate students who are considering careers in athletics data analytics or general data analysis fields participated in a pilot internship program with a variety of athletics programs on campus. Following an encouraging pilot phase (based on informal interviews/testimonials), we now work to establish a formal research and assessment plan for the internship program Via surveys and interviews with student participants as well as participants' supervisors (i.e., athletic coaches/assistants), we seek to investigate the components of the internship and explore how the experience impacts students career interests and self-efficacy related to pursuing a career in data analysis in particular as it relates to sports programs. We introduce the partners, provide an overview of the anticipated research and assessment plan, and discuss preliminary lessons from the program development and implementation. We anticipate that our findings will ignite discussion of how engineering departments can proactively reach beyond industry partners and explore on campus experiential opportunities for students.