My Recent Visit to Houston for Conference and catch up with friends

Past weekend, I travelled to Houston, TX to attend #DSI Annual Conference and Expo. I like to keep my conference trip mixed with activities like exploring city on foot, meeting new people, and catching up with oldies but goodies friends. But, first things first, the conference:

This was my fifth attendance to DSI conference in a row, I was given a 5 year attendee ribbon. I was excited and a bit nervous to give 2 talks about my service learning projects that I integrated in Business Analytics I in this semester. I arranged a service learning project with Beyond Housing in St. Louis. Who they are?

“We are a comprehensive community development organization convening partners and providing leadership. From purchasing a home to health, education, jobs, and economic development, we offer holistic resources and support.”

We were given various datasets to assess how well BH is doing in terms of providing support and services to their clients in many areas including housing, education, healthcare, childcare support, etc. You can check my previous post about this Service Learning integration to have more information. I gave a workshop on how to integrate service learning in an analytics course and presented a related research proposal on how to assess the impact of service learning on students growth?

Workshop: Integrating Service Learning into Analytics Education:
Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Research Presentation: Could We Make Business Analytics Courses More Engaging and Impactful with Service Learning? May be, yes! A Comparative Investigation

I received numerous positive feedback about the presentations and it was great finding other colleagues integrating service learning in various courses.

It was good to see old friends, spent good quality time friends from various institutions in the US. We had great food initially at Pinkerton’s Barbecue, then Tempura Indi-Pakistani and lastly at Tourão Brazilian restaurant. All are recommended in the order of: Tourão, Pinkerton’s and Tempura…Flying back was a bit challenging with a delayed flight but now, I am back safe and working to wrap up fall 2022, then have a reflection about 2022 in the holidays.