Internship experience a win-win for iSchool interns, COUNTRY Financial

Tanvi Malhotra, Julia Hart, and Anmol Gandhi
Tanvi Malhotra, Julia Hart, and Anmol Gandhi

When Julia Hart, site leader for the COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab, is in need of interns, she looks to the iSchool for student talent. Hart's first hire for the DigitaLab, which was launched at the University of Illinois Research Park in October 2017, was MS/IM student Anmol Gandhi. Gandhi still works at the lab as a data analyst, along with fellow MS/IM student Tanvi Malhotra. The students' job duties include predictive modeling, machine learning, text mining, and data visualizations as well as data modeling and research.

Since hiring Gandhi and Malhotra, Hart has not been disappointed, describing their performance as "outstanding." This past summer, Gandhi was nominated for the Research Park's Most Outstanding Graduate Student Intern, and both students were nominated for Most Competent and Collaborative Team awards. 

"Anmol has been instrumental in leading the data team, developing processes related to data within the DigitaLab and creating a framework in which a foundation is being built for predictive analytics and machine learning, with a Neural-Net Data Matrix Model," Hart said. "This model has spearheaded conversations related to data governance and provided a basis on which to extend thinking related to data in the insurance industry moving forward."

The DigitaLab has become "like a second home" for Gandhi. He enjoys not only the data-heavy projects in fraud analytics and customer retention modeling but also the opportunity to give back to society and volunteer for different causes. 

"Currently I am a lead on several projects, so I talk to business sponsors and stakeholders with respect to project requirements, updates, and timelines," Gandhi said. "It's a great opportunity for me, as I am getting exposure to project management early in my career."

Malhotra, who started at the DigitaLab this past summer, found her internship to be the right balance between building machine learning models and associating a business value with them. Although her knowledge of the insurance industry was limited at the start, she came to realize how the models she was helping to build could save the company money, time, and effort.

"My iSchool classes equipped me to not only build the machine learning models but also to query data and apply [SQL] joins to create relevant data sets, clean messy data, translate a model into graphs and visualizations, and document the results," Malhotra said. "I learned about a confusion matrix in class, but the business value associated to each term in the matrix was something new I learned at the lab, and we had teams from the home office coming in every week to get us acquainted with that concept."

Hart, who is also an adjunct lecturer at the iSchool, has recruited from the School for the majority of her lab's data team.

"I have worked with the iSchool for a number of years in the past and am aware of the quality of the programs, the types of coursework, and the talent of the students," Hart said. "The skills that I was looking for in our interns included both technical and nontechnical—focusing on communication, initiative, and teamwork as well as programming skills and a good understanding of data science. I believe this is why the COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab has had great success with students from the iSchool."

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

Student award recipients announced

The School of Information Sciences recognized student award recipients at the iSchool Convocation on May 18. Awards are based on academic achievements as well as attributes that contribute to professional success. For more information about each award, including past recipients, visit the Student Awards page. Congratulations to this year's honorees!

iSchool alumni and student named 2025 Movers & Shakers

Two iSchool alumni and an MSLIS student are included in Library Journal's 2025 class of Movers & Shakers, an annual list that recognizes 50 professionals who are moving the library field forward as a profession. Leah Gregory (MSLIS '04) was honored in the Advocates category, Billy Tringali (MSLIS '19) was honored in the Innovators category, and University Library Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian Mary Ton (current MSLIS student) was honored in the Educators category.

Spectrum Scholar Spotlight: Dalia Ortiz Pon

Twelve iSchool master's students were named 2024–2025 Spectrum Scholars by the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services. This "Spectrum Scholar Spotlight" series highlights the School's scholars. MSLIS student Dalia Ortiz Pon earned her bachelor's degree in Latina/Latino studies from San Francisco State University. 

Dalia Ortiz Pon

Debnath datafies "The Bulletin"

MSIM student Tan Debnath, whose interests span data mining, statistical modeling, text mining, and digital humanities, joined the Center for Children's books as a research assistant. He was tasked with building curation processes that would datafy seventy-five years' worth of archival issues of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, one of the nation's leading children's book review journals.

Tan Debnath stands casually with his hands in his pockets and smiles broadly at the camera. It's a sunny day

iSchool undergraduates selected as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute (IHSI) has selected BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur and BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig as 2025 Community-Academic Scholars. Representing nineteen majors and nine minors in eight colleges and schools at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and two additional universities, the eighteen scholars in this cohort encompass diverse fields of study, from community health to graphic design to statistics. 

BSIS+DS student Lara Terpetschnig and BSIS student Dhanvi Puttur