At Ozmo, we cultivate a culture of collaboration where our employees – who we affectionately refer to as “Ozmonauts" – communicate cross-departmentally and share innovative ideas towards reaching a novel solution to challenging problems. A core value to Ozmo's mission is to foster a community of lifelong learners and to take pride in the mentorship of others. Whether it's through our weekly educational Ozmosis presentations, Kahoot! trivia or our company-wide meetings, employees of Ozmo can attest to all of the general learning and knowledge sharing that takes place, both in the office and remotely.
With that in mind, it only makes sense that Ozmo would look to expand our culture of learning into the community that surrounds our headquarters in Blacksburg, Virginia.
The history of Ozmo and Virginia Tech CMDA
Virginia Tech’s Computational Modeling & Data Analytics (CMDA) program draws from the strengths in existing core departments including Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science to answer the growing demand in the workforce for data analytics expertise. This unique program prepares students to enter the workforce ready to make an impact. The program ends with a Senior Capstone assignment where students work on real world projects with business sponsors ranging from Virginia Tech departments like Physics and Animal Science to state and federal partners, such as NASA and NIST.
Since 2016, Ozmo has been a partner and sponsor of the Virginia Tech CMDA program to guide undergraduate students through the facilitation and completion of an annual Senior Capstone project. Ozmo provides CMDA students with the opportunity to gain exposure to real-world challenges and associated data. Through our partnership with Virginia Tech, students in the CMDA program build professional relationships with Ozmonauts and get a peek into the interesting products and unique culture that Ozmo cultivates.
The VT CMDA program allows students the opportunity to build skill sets to tackle the world’s big-data problems through applied computation. Ozmo benefits from having access to this talent trained on cutting edge machine learning (ML) and data analysis techniques to provide a fresh look at the problems we face solving for every support question at scale.
The Ozmo and CMDA partnership has facilitated the longest running corporate/student partnership in our program’s history. We always represent Ozmo to our students as being one of our longest and most valued relationships, one which presents unique technical challenges for them to tackle, and for which we have high expectations of what they’ll achieve.
Computational Modeling & Data Analytics (CMDA) Capstone Program Director and Associate Professor of Practice at Virginia Tech, Frederick W. Faltin
Recognizing great minds in Blacksburg
Participating in the program with Virginia Tech is a symbiotic relationship where our team at Ozmo has the opportunity to mentor and promote career development among undergraduate students while tackling some of the largest problems that require an academic element.
This relationship also allows us to work directly with an excellent pool of bright, young minds right in the heart of Blacksburg, Virginia, including some of Ozmo’s very own: “At Ozmo, there are no wrong ideas and our team challenges us to push further so we could grow to new heights with our knowledge. It has been a real privilege to work with the Innovations team and it has definitely influenced me to set my goals on becoming a better data analyst,” said former CMDA student, now an Ozmo Associate Support Analyst, Jacob Powell.
Want to learn more about the perks of being an Ozmonaut?
At Ozmo, one of our goals is to retain valuable, dedicated individuals and expand the community around our headquarters. The CMDA partnership has allowed us to mentor, train and provide career-building opportunities for students, which has been paramount to our success.
Since first working with Ozmo on the annual Virginia Tech CMDA Student Capstone project in 2020, I've experienced a great deal of growth, both in my personal and professional life. I have now become a full-time Support Analyst on the Insights team where I assist in training, develop documentation for devices and standardization across the department and assist in making new tools that help in the use of data analytics at Ozmo.
Associate Support Analyst at Ozmo, Jacob Powell
Meet the “Cozmic Coders”
In the Fall of 2021, Ozmo sponsored its seventh round of CMDA students. The focus for last year’s partnership was to create a business model built on Ozmo’s analytics data to promote data-driven decision making as our products evolve. Ozmo has tens of thousands of agents utilizing our product to solve user problems and our team relies on their input to predict trends in the device support industry. Further evolving our mission of solving issues at scale.
From left to right: Andrew Wingfield, Shaan Chudasama, Yuling (Chloe) Gao and Shunyao Yu.
What the future holds for Ozmo and Virginia Tech CMDA
As Ozmo continues to grow and solve more complex issues at scale, we will have the continuous need to stay on top of cutting edge practices and bring in additional talent to solve these problems. Virginia Tech’s CMDA program is aligned with Ozmo in this mission as we continue to support one another moving forward.
Recently the program has expanded into offering both fall and spring semester Senior Capstones and we look forward to having double the opportunity to bring these challenges to their students and solve them together.
If you are interested in learning more about what it's like to work at Ozmo, visit our careers page or contact our team for more details.
