In an era of data-driven decision-making, a team of MBS Externship Exchange students took on a puzzle from CGI, one of the largest IT and business consulting firms in the world. On April 29th, 2024, a team of externs visited the CGI office in New Brunswick, New Jersey to hand off the work of their semester-long project to their mentors. The presentation was conducted in a hybrid fashion in front of CGI employees at the office and on Zoom.
What is an Externship?
The MBS Externship Exchange provides students the opportunity to work on real-world projects in teams. The CGI externship team consisted of students across schools at Rutgers, both graduate and undergraduate, with three students serving as co-leads. Externship projects provide students with hands-on, experiential work under the guidance of mentors in areas related to concentrations in the Master of Business and Science degree as well as business, finance, and marketing. Since the program’s start in 2016, the MBS Externship Exchange has partnered with over 175 mentors and 148 partner organizations.
At the end of the semester, each externship team presents condensed versions of their findings during a hyper-fast round of lightning talks and produces a full presentation to hand off to corporate sponsors.
Meet the Team
In spring 2024, CGI provided students with three exceptional mentors:
- Vikram Gupta, Head of Artificial Intelligence Practice
- Douglas Vargo, Vice President of Emerging Technologies
- Narendra Sadivi, Full Stack Generative-AI Engineer
Each mentor provided the team of students with a different dimension of support as they helped students overcome problems.
MBS alumni Ivan Mera, Senior Data Optimization Analyst at Spokeo, served as the team’s MBS advisor. MBS Senior Advisor Lori Dars was also in attendance for the handoff.
The externship team consisted of students Soham Phargade (Co-Lead), Lisa Hammache (Co-Lead), Prisha Shah (Co-Lead), Meera Bhanushali, Kush Patel, Kunj Sandeep Oza, Faiza Fairoz, and Michael Smith.
Tackling Synthetic Data Generation
CGI tasks externs with real-world projects inspired by the actual needs of customers and partners.
For the spring 2024 semester, the externship team’s project revolved around data scarcity and bias. In a world that’s growing ever-reliant on data, the team was tasked with a game-changing project: to develop synthetic data using large language models (LLMs). To meet this need, the team developed an application that produces synthetic data through artificial intelligence (AI).
"With many of CGI commercial, State, and Local Govt clients, real-world production data contains sensitive information about individuals or organizations and cannot be used for testing, researching and solving industry problems,” said Vikram Gupta. “Synthetic data generation allows researchers and practitioners to generate data that retains the statistical properties of the original data while removing any identifying information, thus preserving privacy. In certain domains, such as life sciences, obtaining real-world data may be challenging due to various constraints such as cost, time, or limited availability. Synthetic data generation provides a way to create data that simulates real-world scenarios, allowing researchers and practitioners to overcome data scarcity issues.”
The team of externs used Streamlit and ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo to create a web application. The team demonstrated the application live to the audience, inputting a schema into the front-end of their generator and showcasing the synthetic data produced.
The team shared insights and takeaways, highlighting the importance of teamwork. Every extern brought unique talents to the team.
The hand-off ended as the team shared recommendations for the future, next steps, and fielded questions from the audience.
A Lasting Impact
Over the semester-long project, the team of externs gained skills that will benefit them as professionals in any field. This includes time management and communication—some of the most in-demand skills employers look for in job candidates.
“This externship was my final semester and final externship, so I was very excited for it,” said MBS student Kunj Sandeep Oza. “Synthetic data generation was a new concept for me and my team. Understanding what synthetic data generation is and how we could add value to the project was our main focus,” said Oza. He added that his team overcame many challenges during this externship but ultimately succeeded in understanding what synthetic data generation is and how this technology can revolutionize the world of machine learning and AI.
“As part of CGI-Rutgers partnership on generative AI,” said Gupta, “CGI-ETP worked with Rutgers students to solve the complex challenge of generating data real-world scenarios which allows our clients, researchers, and practitioners to overcome data scarcity issues. This has been a very challenging and rewarding experience for Rutgers MBS students and for CGI to develop a joint partnership on applied applications on generative AI."
For more information about the MBS Externship Exchange program, visit our website. You can also read about lightning talks from our extern teams.