Because of the value, our industry partners place on business
soft skills training, during their first semester of study, our
students enroll in Business Skills Development. The course is
dedicated to developing soft skills such as oral and written
communication, the art of persuasion, storytelling, knowing
one’s audience, group communication, interpersonal
interaction, networking, interviewing, and career planning.
These skills are rehearsed and reinforced with hands-on
activities like mock interviews, elevator speeches, and a
mock career fair and business dinner.
The required core curriculum ensures that all students
build a strong analytics and technical foundation. The
analytics core curriculum includes training in basic statistical
methods, visualization, regression, time series, data mining,
and machine learning. During the summer before entering
the MSBA program, students must earn a certificate in R
programming. This basic set of coding skills is strengthened
with more technical content in R, Python, VBA, database
management, SAS, and big data technologies. By design,
all students complete 24.5 hours of analytics and technical
courses during the first year of study so they are prepared to
make an impact in their required summer internship.
What kind of practical exposure would be offered to
students as part of the program?
Practical experience abounds for our MSBA students, but
perhaps the best real-world experience for the students is
their capstone course, taken during their third, and final,
semester. They work in small teams of four or five students
on a project with a client company. The faculty appoints
one student per team to serve as the project manager.
Each such student receives custom project management
training from a program alumnus just before the start of
the capstone semester. Every student also attends a custom
High Performing Teams workshop designed specifically
for our MSBA students to further sharpen their teamwork,
problem-solving, creative thinking, project management,
and business soft skills prior to the start of the capstone
semester. Every team is assigned a faculty mentor who
serves as a resource for the group. At the beginning of
the semester, where travel distance permits, each student
team, along with the faculty mentor, travels to the client’s
headquarters to meet with the project team. Together they
further define the problem, assess the data availability, and
scope the deliverables. The students are able to hear about
the symptoms of the client’s business issue directly from the
client. They see the processes as they relate to the business
problem and learn to ask the right questions to formulate
a structured business problem statement. Throughout
the capstone semester, the teams have weekly video or
conference calls with their client. Each team also provides
periodic updates to other student teams and their faculty
advisors during the capstone class meetings. At the end of
the semester, the students deliver their recommendations
in an oral presentation to high-level executives from the
corporate sponsor and provide a final written report as
well. Most client companies immediately act on the insights
or scale up and deploy the analytical models developed by
the capstone teams.Each spring, a corporate partner also sponsors our annual
MSBA case competition. The company provides a case
description of a current problem and an accompanying
dataset. The class self-selects into teams and is given
48 hours to complete the analysis, prepare a visual
presentation of results, and deliver an oral presentation
to the corporate analytics group. The students are forced
to think critically and transform data into insights in a very
short timeframe. The industry partners challenge each team
with difficult questions. This real-world analytic exercise
serves as invaluable training for our students.55
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DATA SCIENCE INSTITUTES IN 2019