The M.Eng. program in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell University showcases an exceptional breadth of student projects that reflect both the diversity of industries served and the evolving frontiers of data science and analytics. These projects span public and private sectors, from health care and legal services to finance, manufacturing and online retailing.
As Eric Gentsch, M.Eng. director, explains, “Our partners run the gamut of private and public, for-profit and non-profit, well-known and lesser-known companies.” This wide range of industry collaborators enables students to apply advanced analytics to real-world challenges. The unifying theme across all projects, Gentsch emphasizes, is “combining data analytics and operations research techniques to help these organizations run better.”
Recent M.Eng. projects demonstrate the innovative and impactful nature of this work. Students have helped optimize appointment scheduling for Cayuga Health Partners, improved customer segmentation for E&J Gallo Winery, and enhanced demand forecasting models for NETGEAR. Others have worked with global firms like Johnson & Johnson to refine health care provider sales strategies and with Deutsche Bank to integrate natural language processing into financial product interfaces.
A project that stood out for its uniqueness was done with a non-profit organization called The Bail Project. Founded in 2017, The Bail Project aims to pay bail for people who are not financially able to do so for themselves. It also provides pretrial services, including helping people get transportation to their hearings. If a person misses a court appearance, they forfeit their bail money and are subject to incarceration. The M.Eng. project had students perform analytics to balance time, cost, and accessibility in providing ride services to individuals scheduled for court appearances.
Two other projects from this past year pushed the boundaries of what’s typical in the program. These were the Epiq and Itemize projects, both of which delved into the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language models. “What made them cutting edge,” Gentsch said, “was we expanded the reach of AI more than projects usually do.” Historically, many projects used machine learning for classification or forecasting decision-making, but these ventures extended those concepts to broader business process automation.
The project with Epiq, a legal services provider, is especially noteworthy. It tackled the labor-intensive process of legal discovery, in which lawyers and paralegals sift through volumes of documents to identify facts relevant to a case. The Cornell team applied emerging AI techniques to automate significant portions of this process. “Automating that process would save a lot of time and free manual labor for higher-skilled work,” Gentsch noted, adding that this approach has the potential to “be a great productivity boon” for the legal field.
Sponsors of Cornell’s Financial Engineering Projects range from global banks, asset managers, and exchanges to fintech startups, crypto funds, and even music royalty and betting platforms. Projects span markets including equities, fixed income, FX, and digital assets, and explore themes such as AI-driven trading, NLP for macro forecasting, market microstructure, and predictive analytics for alternative assets. “Our students apply advanced technical and quantitative skills to offer fresh perspectives and help drive innovation across a broad spectrum of financial challenges,” says Professor Victoria Averbukh, Director of CFEM. “Each project is carefully vetted by faculty to ensure it delivers real value to sponsors.”
Across the board, these projects illustrate the M.Eng. program’s commitment to blending academic rigor with practical relevance. With projects often starting in the fall and concluding in spring, students gain sustained, immersive experience tackling real challenges using advanced analytical tools. As Gentsch put it, the goal is to “use advanced analytics for better decision-making” – a mission Cornell students realize every year through their wide-ranging and sophisticated capstone efforts.