Practice while you study: Student gets byte-sized experience with GovHack

Putting the skills you learn in the classroom to the test in a real-world setting is an important part of the university experience, and one Charles Darwin University (CDU) student is making sure he gets the most out of his coursework by challenging himself from the very start.

CDU Master of Data Science student Syed Haroon Ahmad recently participated in GovHack 2025, a competition across Australia and New Zealand that invites anyone and everyone to work with real government data to solve a given problem. 

Mr Ahmad said his team of eight chose a challenge issued by the NT Government, where a unique dataset required cleaning and prepping for use in his team’s custom hybrid LLM pipeline. 

“Depending on the state of a dataset behind an AI chatbot, asking it a question might cause the bot to ‘hallucinate’ a response, so the question for this challenge was how we could verify whether the information the chatbot gave users was correct,” Mr Ahmad said.

“Before starting my Masters, I had a background in data analysis and engineering, so I spent the second day cleaning the data we were given and preparing it for the next stage, which other members in our team who had the right experience to keep the project progressing.”

Mr Ahmad, who is in his first semester of study at CDU, said projects like GovHack were important for students because it not only exposed them to the type of work they would complete in industry, but also taught them to work in teams whose members are highly specialised in areas different to their own. 

He will learn the how their group – Team Astra – fared in the competition regionally in September, with the overall results being released in October. 

CDU Course Coordinator for ata science and Artificial Intelligence courses Dr Yakub Sebastian said GovHack was a great example of how students can engage with open data and civic challenges while they learn.

“At CDU, we believe that hands-on learning is essential for developing future-ready IT professionals,” Dr Sebastian said.

“Events like this offer students an extremely valuable chance to work collaboratively and apply the technical skills they learned from their courses in real-world scenarios. 

“That’s exactly the kind of experience we champion at CDU – it is not just about coding, it is about solving problems that matter.”