world industry experience throughout the entire program. The
program’s technical content represents a balanced blend of
data science, statistics, and operations research, but that
alone is not enough to be a great analytics practitioner. You
also need the ability to identify and solve the right problem,
so our curriculum includes targeted content to develop a
student’s business acumen, but we didn’t stop there. The
combination of technical skills and business sense is still
no guarantee of effectiveness. You also must have a strong
set of soft skills to be able to work with others, manage
projects, interpret results, and communicate the problem,
methods, and insights. Our curriculum is designed to deliver
on all of these necessary elements.
We incorporate real-world experience throughout all aspects
of the program. This keeps the focus on our ultimate goal of
preparing great practitioners. These experiences take many
forms, including first-hand cases and datasets embedded
within coursework, subject matter experts who lecture in our
classrooms, and a required summer internship. We foster
constant interaction with practitioners through a variety
of touchpoints including our Business Analytics Forum,
industry-sponsored case competitions and hackathons, and
through our semester-long crown jewel of experiences, the
capstone. In the capstone, students experience the full life
cycle of a team project with an actual corporate client. The
projects are authentic, challenging, and important to the
client companies, most of whom are Fortune 100s.
Please share some major achievements of the Haslam
MSBA program under your leadership.
To date, the three-semester Haslam MSBA program has
achieved 100 percent employment of its graduates within
six months of graduation for every class since the program’s
inception. In April 2018, the Haslam MSBA program was
named the winner of the INFORMS UPS George D. Smith
Prize, awarded annually since 2012 to an academic program
or department for effective and innovative preparation of
students to be good practitioners of operations research,
management science, or analytics. INFORMS, the Institute
for Operations Research and Management Science, is the
leading international association for operations research
and analytics professionals. The Haslam MSBA program is
the first analytics program to receive the award.
What have been the most significant challenges that the
MSBA program has faced at the forefront of analytics?
The primary challenge has been maintaining a cutting-
edge curriculum that trains students in the technical skills
demanded by the industry in the rapidly evolving area
of analytics. We keep our finger on the pulse of analytics
in the industry through constant contact with our industry
partners via our departmental advisory board, our Business
Analytics Forum, our capstone partners, corporate recruiters,
and annual benchmarking efforts. Our ability to then
continuously place the most relevant technical skill set the
market demands into the hands of our graduates’ hinges
on an agile curriculum. Our curriculum, for example, has
included a course in data mining since inception. Also, in
the past five years, machine learning has transformed from
an academic niche to mainstream relevance. In 2016, in
response to market demand, we added Python to the list of
programming languages that our students learn. We also
increased the machine learning content of our data mining
classes and added a course in big data technologies. In
spring 2019, we are adding an entire course devoted to
deep learning. Our business analytics faculty will teach this
course and deliver it in the context of business applications.Can you brief us about the course curriculum and
pedagogy of analytics education in the Haslam MSBA
program?
The Haslam MSBA is a three-semester program that
begins each fall. It requires a summer analytics internship
with graduation following the second fall semester of the
study. The program is comprised of 38 required semester
hours. All students must take a prescribed set of 26 hours
of core courses during their first two semesters. In their final
semester, students enroll in a capstone course along with
nine required hours of electives where they may choose
to specialize in supply chain analytics, marketing and
consumer analytics, data science, or become an analytics
generalist.Since the Haslam MSBA is housed in a college of business,
students who enter the program with no business background
are asked to enroll in the MBA Operations Management
course and may enroll in MBA courses such as accounting,
supply chain, and marketing to learn the fundamentals of
business, an aspect of the program critical to our students’
success.54
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