By Thomas Jilk
Students tackled a range of challenges for four local and regional organizations, applying data and user experience skills to build creative solutions.
MS Information students are trained to be skilled with data. But in the classroom, datasets are traditionally clean, relatively small, and ready for immediate analysis. Inside real organizations, data is often scattered and massive in scope; complex work like deduplicating, merging, and standardizing is required to enable analysis and inform decisions.
That vital work is exactly what students in the MS Information capstone course conducted during the spring 2026 semester, partnering with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), ABC Supply, Recreation & Wellbeing (Rec Well), and Recollection Wisconsin to solve data and information problems.
In working directly with these Wisconsin-based partners, Information School (iSchool) students sharpen their technical knowledge while practicing “soft skills” equally valued by employers. “Figuring out how to articulate your thoughts and plans — what you’ve done and what you’ll do next — that’s a really valuable skill the students build along the way,” said Teaching Faculty Bradley Bryant, the instructor for the capstone course this semester.
Solving partners’ problems
The students worked in groups to address varied challenges posed by the partner organizations. Rec Well, for instance, asked students to make sense of data from a large survey of recreation centers across Big Ten universities. This involved reconciling inconsistent or incomplete responses, cleaning and standardizing the vast amount of data involved, and presenting a usable dashboard to navigate the survey results. Through that project, the students are “helping not just our Rec Well, but it theoretically could be used by other universities across the Big Ten,” Bryant noted.
For the Wisconsin DNR, students were charged with extracting data from more than 1,300 PDF reports, some of which featured “tables within tables within tables,” as Bryant put it. Using tools like Python and Pdfplumber, the students were able to transform a seemingly unmanageable archive into analysis-ready datasets. As one DNR partner shared after the students’ final presentation at Morgridge Hall on April 28, “People are very excited about this.”
Meanwhile, students working with ABC Supply tackled an e-commerce problem: data quality for the company’s wide array of products. The team developed an AI-supported image analysis pipeline to validate product data, identifying inconsistencies and gaps to fill. One ABC Supply partner called the students’ work “excellent,” and Bryant was impressed with their achievement of “build[ing] a usable product within a short timeframe.”
Finally, Leah Goldblum MS’26 worked with Recollection Wisconsin, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving and enabling digital access to Wisconsin’s rich history. Goldblum’s task was to improve the user experience of the Recollection Wisconsin website in preparation for an upcoming redesign. “Leah’s hard work, keen eye for user needs, and creative problem-solving have left us with an excellent foundation to implement with our developer,” according to the organization’s newsletter.
Across all of the partnerships, students delivered tangible results, transforming unwieldy data into actionable insights for organizations to put to immediate use.
The first of many
Since the MS Information program launched in 2021, its students have been engaging with organizations through internships in data analytics, user experience design, software development and cybersecurity. The capstone weaves those experiences directly into the curriculum. For students, the course offers invaluable exposure to the messy, open-ended challenges that demand creative approaches and define modern information work.
As partnerships deepen between the MS Information program and organizations across Wisconsin, the capstone is positioned to become a long-term bridge between students and industry. Each time the iSchool works with a new partner, Bryant said, “Our hope is that this is the first of many projects and relationship-building initiatives with these organizations.”