This is what we believe to be our final journal entry of the year. Since our last post, we have essentially concluded our project. We filmed our final, wrap-up podcast and uploaded it to our YouTube channel, polished our website, submitted our official project title and write-up, worked on our Fellows Fair promo slide, and filmed and uploaded our Fellows summary video. To finish out the year, we have two presentations (the Fellows Fair and the Fellows Presentations) and our work as a Severn Fellow will officially be over. We have discussed it across our podcasts and summary video, but this project has truly been an honor to work on. We continue to reflect on how much we have learned over the course of the year about data collection, modeling, statistics, podcasting, promoting a project, and even working together on an assignment so large. We can confidently say that the highs of this project severely outnumbered the lows, and we will both reflect on this project as a highlight of our time at Severn and we will not soon forget what we have learned over the past year. We have the utmost graciousness for the Eney Family for allowing us this opportunity and we are excited to finish the year with two strong presentations.
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Wow. What a week it was. Since our last blog post, it has been a hectic, fellows-filled two weeks. We began by creating our YouTube channel (Severn Fellows Team Draft) and posting our first three podcasts. In our first podcast, we discussed the basis of our project and our ideas for the upcoming draft. Next, we held an episode discussing advanced stats and their role in the current-day NFL. This topic was important to us because our project began on the basis of the increase of statistical importance in the game of football. Next, we had a busy weekend of late-night modeling, spending hours upon hours creating our final model that predicted the success of each player. Using this data, we created our big board and then transferred it into a first-round mock draft. We spent 80 minutes dissecting this mock in our podcast episode before the draft. Finally, on draft night (April 28) we were able to stream on Admiral TV, a nearly 4 hour live stream analyzing each pick of the first round in what was our grand finale to our Fellows project. We are both SO proud of how everything turned out and could not have been happier with everything that transpired. We have a few more podcast episodes scheduled so that we can do a debrief on our model and we are obviously still locked in so that we can finish our presentations strong, but Thursday night left us with a triumphant feeling of success after over a year of hard work.
We officially have ten school days left this year and we are very excited to finish this project strong. Our podcasts will begin to be published very soon along with our official mock draft. We are working on gathering data for the 2022 class as Pro Days are finishing up for the current class and we finally have access to complete statistics. From there, we will plug that data into our model and, believe it or not, we will be entirely finished with the bulk of our project. All we'll have left is to simply talk about what we found over the next two weeks and do a couple polishing touches on the project. This is a good feeling, as it allows us to take the entirety of May to simply prepare our presentations of our project. We can truly see the finish line now and we are excited to end off strong with our culminating draft day podcast on April 28th.
Without a whole lot new to report, we feel excited to be beginning our podcasts in the coming week. We are continuing to watch the NFL Draft coverage, updating ourselves on each of the major prospects that we are planning to assess during our podcasts. Our first podcast will be looking through our multitude of spreadsheets and discussing what we learned about the process of collecting data. We are excited to be finishing up this process and are already thinking ahead to our presentations of our project and how we'd like to walk people through our project.
We are at the midway point of Spring Break and the end of our project is closing in. We have essentially completed the data and are now planning on finishing the model in time to return to school for our podcasts. The modeling is going well, as our extensive data collection has set us up well for this point in our project. We are looking forward to a strong finish to the year, with much of our focus on our Fellows Project!
We are so excited to have presented our Fellows progress thus far. Making our presentation unearthed feelings of nostalgia from the beginning of our project and also a sense of pride and accomplishment for coming this far and learning all that we have. We both felt very good about the presentation and are excited to continue our project over the coming months. For the rest of February, we are planning on meeting with Mrs. Carsley to discuss our presentation and we will continue to model. Simultaneously, we are in the background preparing to begin podcasting within the next few months, so we will be talking to Devan, Kieran, and Ella about getting everything set up for that process.
Progress has begun to slow on our actual project because a new obstacle has come up that is perhaps even MORE exciting than our actual project - our Fellows presentation! We are thrilled to share all of our hard work with the panel of adults around Severn School, as this eight month process has given us so much to tell! As we work to rehearse and polish our presentation, we are simultaneously continuing to test out different models and collecting new data for the 2014 NFL Draft. There is minimal information to report, as it's just more collection and getting ready for our presentation. We look forward to receiving our Fellows pins!
The past two weeks have consisted of mostly filling out the data for our next draft class - we were correct in our prior assessment that the next couple draft classes would take considerably less time than the first. We are about two thirds of the way through the 2014 draft class and will finish it up over the next few days. While we would love to continue with more modeling as our top priority, we will probably be shifting our focus towards our presentation. We are excited and hopeful to continue on with the Fellows program and think we have a good view of where the project should be taken from here. Especially as we enter second semester, we are very prepared to shift much more focus onto our Fellows project. With not much else to report besides data collection, we are looking forward to the next few months of this exciting project.
We are coming to a close on what was a very productive winter break, and year as a whole. Reminiscing on our preliminary meeting with Ms. Carsley, we are very proud of the progress that we have made and the road bumps that we have overcome. The break began with a Thursday afternoon meeting with Dr. Groves - the first time we were able to meet in person. She had printed us sheets worth of research that she had found on different stats that we may want to look into. She also showed us some new modeling strategies that we planned to investigate over break. It was great to see her in person and we hope to continue to do so over the coming months. During break, we found a solution to one of our earlier statistic problems - with no singular compilation of defensive statistics, it was going to take some pain-staking data collection to fill out our tables. With the lots of extra time on our hands, we were able to do so. We now plan on continuing to collect data for the next draft class, from 2013, and use it to refine our model. We're right on track and look forward to focusing even more on Fellows now that the college process is coming to a close.
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