May 16th, 2016: A group of four engineering students from Canadian University Dubai (CUD) have been highly commended in the fourth annual UAE Undergraduate Student Research Competition, held recently in Abu Dhabi.
The all-girl team successfully made it through two qualifying rounds to reach the finals of the competition with their unique research project, which examined the statistical relationship between oil prices and the Dubai Financial Market (DFM) Index.
Despite their shared background in engineering, Shaheera Khan, Mehak Fatima Ashfaq, Mina Abdulrahman Ahmad, and Alia Khalifa Jumma, were inspired by one of their classes with Math professor, Dr. Firuz Kamalov, to take the unusual decision to enter the economics category of the competition.
Charting the Brent oil price over a period of four years, the team set out to investigate whether the fluctuating price of oil in the international marketplace had any effect on the stability of the Dubai economy.
Shaheera explained, “We put a lot of research into gathering historical data for both oil prices and the DFM Index over a four year period. We then used regression analysis to create a graphical model to assess the trends across one, two and four years.”
Mina continued, “Our findings were very interesting, as they showed that, while there were some short-term impacts, the overall, long-term trend was that oil prices did not affect the performance of the Dubai economy.”
The team submitted their research for the initial qualifying stage of the competition in February, and was then invited to take part in the following round, which required the development of a 12 page paper outlining the research approach and findings. Based on the quality of their paper, the girls were invited to join fellow qualifiers at the national-level competition, which took place at Abu Dhabi University.
The final event saw the team deliver a ten minute presentation and take on a Q&A session with an independent judging panel of scientists, engineers and professionals from the higher education arena, who highly commended the project, and awarded certificates of recognition to the participating students.
Though they ultimately missed out on the winner’s trophy, the competition was a valuable experience for each member of the team. Mehak concluded, “Taking on an economics project was a real challenge, but something that we have learnt so much from. It gave us the opportunity to work on a real-life project and look at things from a professional rather than academic perspective, as well as developing our research, presentation and public speaking skills.”
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