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We are happy to announce the Second McMaster & Co-operators Problem Solving e-Workshop edition, jointly organized by the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at McMaster University (https://math.mcmaster.ca/) and The Co-operators General Insurance Company (https://www.cooperators.ca/).

The Workshop will take place online on Saturday, March 13^th, 2021, and will gather representatives from industry, academic mathematicians, undergraduate and graduate students.

This year, we are introducing a new concept: the piscine competition! The Piscine is the final trial during the e-workshop. It is not a swimming trial (Piscine is the French word for “swimming pool”) but a deep dive into the code pool that will let us pick the winners among the most motivated and talented candidates.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come online and spend the entire day modeling and coding your heart out with several other candidates, all hoping to earn the same prize: to be seen as a talent by The Co-operators.

The main goal of this Piscine workshop is to provide the students with an experiential learning opportunity through a concrete real-world problem submitted by the insurance company. The participants will work individually, or in study groups (up to 4 students), and will have the opportunity to learn and develop their interpersonal and technical skills (including data science, statistics, optimization, mathematical finance, programming, communication, etc.). This would also enable the industrial partner to connect with McMaster students. This workshop is also aimed to be an “incubator” of collaborations, that can lead to more long-term and impactful relationships between the participants and the industrial partner.

Moreover, The Co-operators is currently hiring and actively looking for new talents to join their forces for the Actuarial and Business Intelligence teams.

The problem description and the registration details can be found on the Workshop website (http://coopworkshop.ca/). Here are the important dates and deadlines:

• February 5^th, 2021: Registration opens
• February 15^th, 2021: Registration ends and start of the qualification round
• March 5^th, 2021: Announcement of the finalists (e-Workshop participants)
• March 13^th, 2021 (Pi-day-1): A full day e-workshop
• April 1^st, 2021: Announcement of the winners and the prizes

Here are some of the prizes offered to the participants:

• $ 1000x(? -1) total for the top groups
• Invitation to present the results to The Co-operators managerial team
• Job Shadowing with actuaries, statisticians/mathematicians and data scientists
• Aesthetic signed one-pager presentation of your solution for your next job interview
• Door prizes, and more!