After taking courses on programming (R and/or Python), consultancy, data visualization, machine (deep) learning, network analysis and psychometrics, students are ready to put this all into practice in a data driven consultancy format. You can bring your question and data and let students consult you on what you can (or maybe cannot) learn from your data.

✅ Key features of the challenge

• Program: Master Psychology: Behavioral Data Science Track
• Course: Internship Data-Driven Consultancy
• Students per team: 3-4 students.
• No. of hours spent per team: 200 hours
• Duration: January 5 - 30, 2026
• Supervision: Student teams are supervised and guided by senior lecturers from UvA.
• Deliverables: Presentation and report (in the form of slides) with recommendations.
• Company time investment: 8-12 hours in total
• Matching fee: €850,- (ex tax, charged by Master Challenge (NOT the university)).

📑 Challenge Examples

The student teams can work on challenges like, but not limited to, the following:

• Predict customer behavior based on website/app/tool customer interaction data.
• Improve crowd control by using video and sensor data.
• Provide insights on the impact of changes to different types of student data.
• Assess the data quality or reliability/validity of questionnaire data.
• Construct insightful metrics related to your business.
• But any other project that requires the analysis of a (large) dataset to solve a certain problem could be suitable for this challenge.

❗️Behavioral Data Science involves the analysis of behaviorally defined variables as they arise in large datasets ("Big Data"), typically gathered using modern digital technology (e.g., online or through mobile devices) and analyzed with techniques for detecting patterns from high-dimensional data to facilitate understanding, prediction, and control of human behavior (e.g., machine learning).

🏢 Company requirement

• Any company (startup/scale-up/corporate/incubator/NGO) with at least two founders/employees working full time in the company.
• In business for at least 6 months.
• Available dataset (there is time for data understanding / cleaning, but this should not require too much work).

💰 Costs

To help facilitate this challenge a matching fee of €850,- (ex tax) applies (charged by Master Challenge and NOT the university).

❗️You will only be charged when matched to a team.

📨 How to apply

You can submit the challenge directly through the website. Provide a title that summarises the challenge. Subsequently, briefly elaborate on your challenge. See link for a template you could use: https://link.masterchallenge.me/challenge-template or use the challenge generator: https://masterchallenge.me/challenge-generator

🗓 Planning

• November 28 : Deadline for submitting your challenge
• December  1: Receiving message if your challenge is approved by the Course Coordinator
• December 4-12: Matching phase
• December 15: Our matching algorithm will create perfect matches. 
• December 15-19: You will receive a message from your team to plan a Kick-off meeting.
• January 5,6 or 7: Kick-off meeting with your team (hand over data to the team)
• January 28 - 30: Your team will present the results of the project, preferably at the organization but could also be online. Here, at least one person of the organisation is present. The supervisor of the UvA will join as well.