UALR’s Cooperative Education Program places students in internships with local companies where they can gain experience in their fields and use the skills they have learned during their studies.

Syed Bilal Nadeem, a graduate student pursuing a master of science degree in Information Quality (MSIQ), attended a job fair sponsored by the Cooperative Education Program last spring and landed a summer internship with the the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas.

“It’s a great place to work,” said Nadeem, who spent his summer analyzing data from the three Arkansas river dams owned by the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas.

“They are all very nice people, affable and enthusiastic, and they gave me freedom to apply what I’ve learned in data analysis.”

Nadeem’s job was to recognize patterns in the Arkansas River and predict the flow of water, subsequently predicting how much power would be generated.

Born in Hyderabad, India, Nadeem said he realized the importance of having structure in data when he worked for IBM, where he found consistent problems with the quality of customer data. The problem, he said, was not IBM, but the data itself.

Nadeem decided to attend UALR after his brother-in-law told him about the MSIQ program.

“It’s the only place in the U.S. with a master’s program in data quality,” he said.  “The program is structured so that it keeps updating with the trends, and it’s really helpful.”

Nadeem said he is thankful to his parents for their support and to Dr. John Talburt, UALR professor of information science, who has mentored him throughout his experience with the Cooperative Education Program and the internship.

He said the internship helped him enhance his data analysis, prediction and collection skills and he “saved money and bought a car.”

Nadeem will return to the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas as an intern in the summer of 2015, and he hopes to implement a model for using historical water flow and other important parameters like temperature and density of water to predict the following day’s flow and record it in an Oracle database.

The Cooperative Education Program will host the 2014 Career Fair from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 15, in Ledbetter rooms A, B and C of the Donaghey Student Center.

Register for the fair by visiting ualr.edu/co-op.

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