Teams
Pick what sounds like a good afternoon.
Recruitment
Submit application
Application screening
Interview(s)
Decisions & onboarding
What we look for
Much of the founding cohort will arrive with nothing but Excel. You'll learn from the people next to you, not from a syllabus. What we can't supply is the instinct to ask why a number looks the way it does.
You notice when something is off
A total that doesn’t add up. That reflex is the whole job.
You can talk to a business owner
Most clients have never used the word “dataset.”
You finish the boring part
Cleaning is 60% of the work and nobody’s favorite.
You're fine building from nothing
There’s no playbook yet. The first cohort writes it.
Commitment
Apply
- Résumé or CV
- Your position preferences
- Links and relevant coursework, if you have them
- Executive applicants: three short written answers
Analyst and executive board positions are on the same form. Opens in Google Forms; sign in with your Columbia account to attach your résumé.
Questions
Depends on your team: building the outreach list and running the intake call, or reconciling a client’s exports and fitting the model, or running the activities fair and the application funnel, or shipping our tooling. One live client, four to six of you.
Because in an established club every process and leadership seat is already taken. Here you write the scoping template and land the first client.
Depends on the team. Strategy & Client and Marketing need none; Data and Software do. We don’t run classes. We build the room: shared resources, paired work, and people who will sit down and explain it.
Four to six hours a week, spiking near client checkpoints. Founding semesters run hot; we’d rather say so now.
Yes. There’s no seniority ladder to climb because there isn’t a ladder yet.
No. Framing a question and explaining an answer are humanities skills. The technical parts are learnable in a semester.
Then we run a public-data project through the same pipeline: 311 complaints, restaurant inspections, subway performance. You’d still finish with real work.
For businesses
A team of Columbia students, one question, no invoice.
What you get
Your data, actually usable
Consolidated, cleaned, documented, and handed back queryable.
One question, answered
Not a survey of everything. One decision, worked properly.
A dashboard you keep
Live, documented, and yours after the semester ends.
Plain language
A recommendation you could hand to a manager untranslated.
An NDA if you want one
Your data stays yours. Our security team handles protection. We anonymize and delete on request.
No invoice
Free for every client. Not a trial rate, the actual price.
What we need
A real question
Something you’d act on. “Should I keep the Sunday shift?”
Access to whatever data exists
Messy is fine. Four conflicting spreadsheets is the work.
About two hours a month
Kickoff, regular check-ins, final presentation.
One named contact
Someone who can answer “what does this column mean?”
Timeline
Scoping & audit
We pin down the decision and inventory what exists. Walk away here at no cost.
Build
Cleaning, pipeline, analysis, with regular checkpoints.
Analyze & test
The answer, plus a sanity check against what you already believe.
Hand off
Presentation, dashboard, docs, and the cleaned data. Yours either way.
Get in touch
Brief drafted.
This site has no backend yet, so nothing was transmitted. Send it over and we'll get back to you within two days, even if the answer is "we're not the right fit."
REVIEW MY RESPONSES
Questions
Because the realistic alternative is nobody looking at it. Focused attention, at no cost, with an NDA, and you can walk away after the scoping phase.
Nothing. No fee for any client, ever.
You do. NDA on request, anonymized in any public write-up, working copies deleted when you ask.
We’ll tell you early rather than at the end, and you’ll still get an inventory of what’s missing and what to start recording.
We agree the scope with you before starting, sized to what a team can actually finish. If something slips you still get the cleaned data, the documentation, and an honest write-up of where the analysis stands.
Probably not for the first cohort. Being able to walk into the business matters a lot for scoping.