Events at the DSL

2025 Optiver Excel Coding Challenge

About

The Digital Skills Lab have an ongoing partnership with LSE Careers and international market maker Optiver to be providing the recurring challenge and provides students an opportunity to develop practical skills.

The challenge took place in February and focused on decision-making and probabilistic thinking through real-world scenarios in the current financial markets, using Excel. 

The challenge consisted of finding a mispriced market, analysing and justifying the correct probability, presenting their findings to the judges. 39 students took part, representing 15 departments.

The 2025 Excel challenge was a great success, find out more about the event and the winners.

Prerequisites

Before entering the competition, students had to attend Excel prerequisite workshops. Once this step completed, students attended lectures and data retreats, were put into working groups, chose their markets and worked on their final presentations.

If you have another idea for a coding challenge you would like us to help develop, please do get in touch by emailing us at digital.skills.lab@lse.ac.uk.

2024 Optiver Python Coding Challenges

The 2024 Optiver Python Coding Challenge was a great success, find out more about the event and the winners here.  

About

The Digital Skills Lab has an ongoing partnership with LSE Careers and international market maker Optiver to be providing the recurring Python Coding Challenge.  

Previous participants focused on options trading in financial services, utilising a cutting-edge virtual exchange developed by Optiver. They worked in teams to develop trading algorithms in Python; testing and then optimising the algorithm's performance to achieve the best possible trading outcome. 

Target Audience

Open to everyone interested in coding, specifically Python, and its impact on business. Suitable from undergraduates to researchers, and anyone in between.

Prerequisites

To have completed a pre-course on Python.

If you have ideas for a coding challenge you would like us to help develop, please do get in touch by emailing us at digital.skills.lab@lse.ac.uk.

3 Week Masterclass: Data Management & Digital Consulting with Celonis

Timelines

The last Masterclass was successfully delivered in Michaelmas Term 2022.

About

An opportunity to learn with Germany’s and New York’s most valuable startup,  Celonis, what the management of tomorrow will look like in a world that is more digitised than ever. Celonis helps organisations track their internal processes based on digital footprints in IT systems. With this, Celonis has turned into the market leader for Executive Management Technology with customers like Unilever, Coca Cola or BMW. Celonis uses Process Mining technology as well as different AI and ML capabilities to reveal insights into what is happening in an organization and to provide direct recommendations.

In this Mastercourse, students learn about trends in Digital Transformation and Data Driven Management and how process-oriented data science can facilitate an analytical viewpoint internal organizations. It is further a chance to gain business user skills the Celonis software and how to use it in a management and management consulting context.

Why participate in this Management Consulting masterclass?

• Develop consulting skill-set
• Gain skills to solve real-world challenges for companies
• Study the impact of processes on businesses

Target Audience

Open to everyone interested in data science and its impact on business. Suitable from undergraduates to researchers, and anyone in between.

Prerequisites

No prerequisites. An understanding of information systems and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) can provide a good basis, but this is not a requirement.

This masterclass runs as a joint initiative of the LSE Digital Skills Lab, the LSE Data Science Institute and Celonis.