Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN), the
Volcker Alliance’s Government-to-University Initiative, and the
MetroLab Network to name a few. In the past, innovation has
often been driven by the private sector, and it’s taken much
longer for those advances to work their way into the public
and non-profit worlds and return real value. Heinz College not
only wants to shorten the amount of time it takes for advanced
analytics and emerging tech to be adopted by public interest
agencies, but also wants to be proactive about developing
more robust talent pipelines for those organizations. Heinz
College is committed to analytics and technology having broad
social impact that improves peoples’ lives, and its graduates
carry that ‘data for good’ mentality forward into their careers.
For Heinz College, Technological Originality Provides an Edge
A major edge is that Heinz College is part of Carnegie Mellon
University (CMU), a world leader in technological innovation.
When learning about how advanced technologies like artificial
intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and autonomous
vehicles are impacting society, being at CMU gives Heinz
College students an advantage, because many of these
technologies were invented on CMU’s campus. Faculty teach
students not only how to respond to and navigate technological
disruption, but also how to drive innovation that serves the
public good. Another differentiator for Heinz College is that it
heavily emphasizes experiential learning, such as internships,
immersive classes with an applied component, and capstone
projects which pair student teams with an actual industry client
in a dynamic that mirrors consulting. These kinds of experiences
ground the Heinz College education in real-world practice.
Practical Exposure to Business Problems
Many of Heinz College’s courses involve project work for a real
client, which may be anything from a government office that
wants to pilot a new program to a public broadcaster that wants
to better understand its social media engagement. A recent
immersive course involved students crafting new autonomous
vehicle policy for the City of Pittsburgh in which they spent two
full days meeting with transportation and community leaders
and ultimately presented their recommendations to the Mayor’s
office; another course involved students investigating solutions
to combat food insecurity in a section of rural Pennsylvania,
working with a local university and elected leaders to
understand the depth of the issue and how to combat it
ethically.
These face-to-face interactions help the students grapple with
the real implications a policy or program might have in a
community, allowing them to bring principles of human-centered
design to their solutions. Heinz College’s students also get
involved in a great deal of hands-on projects and experiences
beyond the classroom. The college partners with the U.S. Army
War College to conduct a crisis negotiation simulation every
year—which is an extremely popular and valuable event. The
college takes its students on a leadership retreat to Gettysburg,
PA as well. Through clubs and courses, students can focus on
tackling the problems that they are most passionate about
solving. There are also many opportunities for Heinz College
students to work directly with CMU’s leading research centers
and get involved in the university’s renowned startup culture.
As mentioned earlier, internships and capstone projects are
key aspects of the Heinz College experience. Owing to the
analytical and technological expertise that Heinz College
offers, its students often find that they are entrusted with much
higher-level responsibilities than a typical intern, particularly
as it concerns data science and analysis. Capstone projects
offer another valuable opportunity to apply knowledge. The
faculty match up cross-disciplinary student teams with partners
from industry, government, and the non-profit sector to combat
a real business or operational problem over the course of a
semester.
Heinz College students are data-obsessed, and when its
partners can give them access to rich datasets, some very
exciting outcomes can be seen, from the development of
predictive models and text analytics platforms to data mining
tools and evidence-based policy recommendations. It’s a win-
win situation, as the college’s partners get a custom solution,
and its students get to have a real impact on an organization
before they graduate.University-Imparted Knowledge Drives Transformation
Heinz College represents the vanguard in Analytics, Data
Science, and Technology. The college sees these things as
inter-related and becoming more and more connected all the
time. Policy and technology are placing greater and more
complicated demands on each other, and Heinz College has
been leaning into that transformation for decades.
As the technologies fueling the Fourth Industrial Revolution
continue to mature and data becomes more prominent in all
aspects of society, the institute isn’t playing catch up. Because
it has deep expertise in analytics and data science and had
a role in the creation of these disciplines, Heinz College can
be more deliberate and creative about how they are applied
in its programs. The college’s research centers, including the20
THE 10 MOST PROMINENT ANALYTICS AND
20 DATA SCIENCE INSTITUTES IN 2019THE 10 MOST PROMINENT ANALYTICS AND
DATA SCIENCE INSTITUTES IN 2019