It’s the beginning of July, and the University of Texas at Austin looks desolate and empty. The heat index is 110°, and it will be a month and half before the Forty Acres is bustling with its full 50,000 students. Inside the chilly halls of the McCombs School of Business, 53 MSBA students are starting their first semester. Graduation may be ten months away, but these students are only concerned with the rigorous month of classes they are about to begin.

Over the next five weeks, the students will be attending only two classes. Each will meet Monday through Thursday for two hours a day. By the second week of August, these students, who come from diverse backgrounds, will know more than a semester’s worth of material. They will be able to build a variety of models, know how to perform various supervised and unsupervised learning tasks, and understand how to complete simple text analytics. They will have run Monte Carlo simulations and permutation tests. They will have learned to do most of these exercises in R and Python, and they will understand the internal mechanisms of these algorithms to boot. Even if they do not realize it, after a month of just two classes, most of these students will be able to have entire conversations that would have been utterly unintelligible to them before.

And that’s not all.

Most Fridays will be spent working on recruiting prep and career coaching. McCombs has incredible career resources and a team of corporate relation professionals and career coaches will be supporting the students as they learn how to network, write their résumé, perform informational interviews, and get the most out of their job search, which is already beginning. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to learn about the diverse set of recruiters, from Walmart to Deloitte to USAA to Southwest and beyond, that actively support and recruit from the MSBA program at UT.

Somewhere between all of these activities, students will still find time to hang out outside of class. Austin has a lot to offer, and the MSBA students will make the most of it. They will attend local analytics meetups, try out local restaurants (from Trudy’s Tex-Mex to Kome sushi), see a movie at the AlamoDrafthouse, check out the live music scene, and see what all the buzz is about downtown. Whether it is from the work or the fun, many of these students will become fast friends in the short summer semester, another lasting benefit of the Master of Science in Business Analytics program at UT Austin.

-Chase Slocum