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

This summer was by far the best of my life. Not only did I start the MSBA program, which so far has been a blast, but I also got to live out my dream of working at NASA. I was an intern at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I worked on an open source scientific processing platform called SciSpark.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, is the top center for robotic exploration of the solar system. It began in 1936, when a group of graduate students from the California Institute of Technology decided to put their personal reputations – and safety – on the line to perform experiments with rockets, which were seen as mere science fiction instead of a serious academic subject at the time. JPL has now sent spacecraft to every planet in our solar system, and informs much of what we understand about our universe today.

Coming from a computer science background, I was put on a team developing open source software that will help scientists model Earth’s climate 10-100x faster than the previous leading platform that could be used for this (Apache Hadoop). This faster speed makes interactive data exploration possible, allowing scientists to make crucial discoveries in a fraction of the time. In this process, I worked with the top people in their fields from meteorologists to computer scientists to assess how to best serve the people who could benefit from this software.

While I cannot count the number of things I loved about this internship, there are a few highlights that I want to experience again as I decide what to do after I graduate from this program. First, I want to end up on a team with excellent mentors who want me to continue learning as much as I can. At JPL, my questions were always met with kindness and helpful explanations. One of my mentors even helped me to study some research papers in her field that I was new to and interested in. While I love being a student and cringe at the prospect of giving up the schedule of lectures and tech talks that fill my weeks, if I can find a place like this in the future it won’t be so difficult to leave college.

Second, I took a step towards being the change I wanted to see in the world with this internship. Giving people better tools to address climate change is something I imagine I will look back on when I am 80 years old and still be proud of myself for. While every job has its challenges, it is much easier to power through them when you know there will be a huge impact for others when you do.

Many of us in the MSBA program still have much to discover about what we want to spend our 40+ hours a week doing after graduation. My takeaway from this internship going forward is that when you are passionate about what you do and work with great people, those hours don’t seem like work at all. While all of our paths will be different and our criteria for choosing a job will vary dramatically, I hope that we all find careers that make us excited to go to work every morning.

 

– Valerie Roth

Wondering why you should join? We surveyed our program’s students and asked them about the top reasons they chose the University of Texas’s Masters of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program over other similar programs. Here’s how they responded.

Located in the heart of Austin, Texas and housed within the prestigious McCombs School of Business and its Information, Risk, and Operations Management department, the 10-month long MSBA program provides a unique opportunity to acquire valuable skills in both technical and business aspects of analytics. This well-balanced mix of coursework was a major driving factor for this year’s students to choose the University of Texas

With Austin’s thriving tech start-up scene as a backdrop, students are able to attend meet-up and training sessions outside of school to network with some of the best and brightest in the industry. Additionally, the MSBA curriculum includes a semester-long capstone project that provides students with the opportunity to apply their learnings to real-world problems and gain valuable experience working alongside the program’s corporate partners.

A majority of students stated that the impressive placement statistics of prior cohorts (see placement statistics here) and the presence of a dedicated career services team influenced their decision to join the MSBA program.

Finally, this year’s cohort unanimously agreed that the collaborative nature of the program, supplemented by the strong diversity of the student body (see class profile here), is a major contributor to the group’s success.

Balanced coursework at a world- class business school, a dedicated career services team, and the opportunity to work on complex, real-world business problems in the form of capstone project were the most important factors for the class of 2016 in their graduate school decision. We’d love for you to join us and have your own MSBA experience.

–Dhwani Parekh

–Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for more updates!

 

“This program is going to be intense”

This was the common feedback I kept hearing from everyone. During the first week of our semester, all the students associated with the program – new and graduating – were invited to a happy hour networking session at El Mercado, a nearby restaurant. The outcome was truly unique. To quote Professor Hasler, “It was one of the only places in the nation at the moment with more than a hundred analytics professionals under one roof”. Even amidst the lively gathering, the thoughts kept lingering in my mind – How intense is the program? Will I have time to study, prepare myself for a job and have time left to pursue my hobbies? Will I get to sleep during the coming year?

If you are a prospective student, you might be wondering the same. Through this post I want to share a typical day as a business analytics student at Mccombs. The experiences will be different for every student, of course. The semesters are packed with classes, assignments, guest speakers, industry sessions and recruiting events. I strongly believe being constantly engaged with the learning environment is a part of what makes my journey at Mccombs quite exhilarating and worthwhile.

September 4^th 2014 – Thursday

6.00 am – 6.30 am: Wake up, shower, breakfast, dress.

6.30 am – 7.00 am: Talk to a prospective student from India. The applications for next year’s admissions were about to go live soon and as expected, the interest in the program was growing exponentially. A good place to start your research is the program website and the FAQ page

7.00 am – 9.00 am: Complete required readings for class. They are typically posted on Canvas (the online learning management system) the night before. Tuesdays and Thursdays are slightly more hectic due to the electives. I opted for Accounting/Finance and Marketing Analytics 1. More information on the curriculum here.

9.00 am – 9.30 am: Walk to class. I live in West Campus – the residential area closest to campus. UT has a pretty efficient shuttle system, which I generally use. On this day however, I walked. Takes about 15 minutes. Got to stay fit!

9.30 am – 10.45 am: Database Class. Professor Konana was quite impressed with most of us showing up in business professional attire. “I feel under-dressed”, he quipped. Yes, business professional is mandatory for every class. The previous sentence is false. The previous sentence is true. The real reason being we were slated to attend the Executive Council Reception later that evening. More on this later.

11.00 am – 12.30 pm: Lunch at O’s café on the 3^rd floor of Mccombs. Check email (and Facebook). Finish the write-up for the case we were going to study in the accounting class. We discussed a different case every class and the write-ups were due before each class.

12.30 am – 1.45 pm: Accounting Class. Professor Laux discussed about opportunity costs. I ruminate how life in this program is a lesson in opportunity costs – you choose your battles, and hope things go well. Talks about the mid-term jolt me back to reality. I realize I need to get the reference book from PCL (Perry Castaneda Library, which is right across the street from Mccombs)

2.00 pm – 3.30 pm: My time before the marketing class is generally spent in the Reliant Productivity Center. We book a team room and go through the case as a group. We skimmed through the case (do not tell our professor!) and spent a considerable time researching the companies we were about to meet right after class.

3.30 pm – 4.45 pm: Marketing Class. This was my favorite class of the semester. Professor Sonnier always kept the lectures impactful and pulls out great insights. The in-class discussions were a valuable learning experience.

5.00 pm – 7.00 pm: Executive Council Reception. Our program has several corporate partners, who work closely with the faculty and staff to ensure the curriculum is in tune with the industry’s needs. The attendees for this event were a mix of analytics executives, professionals, and recruiters. Most of these companies were also interviewing students from our class the next day. It was a great opportunity to expand our networks and learn more about the analytics needs and projects of across various domains, and hopefully get shortlisted for a few interviews as well!

7.00 pm – 8.00 pm: Deloitte S&O Info Session. Unlike the previous session, which was specific to our program, this event was open to all UT students. This was another useful opportunity to meet stalwarts from the consulting industry and learn more about the upcoming opportunities.

8.30 pm – 9.00 pm: Dinner at Thai, How Are You?, one of the many restaurants on the Drag. Food, sweet food.

9.00 pm – 9.15 pm: Walk home. Still burning them calories.

9.15pm – 10.30 pm: Plan schedules for the team meetings next week. Check mails (and the social media universe). Mails from Candice about getting shortlisted for interviews are always revitalizing. Spend some time preparing for the interviews. The career course has helped us a lot in this regard – from getting our resume ready, providing tips for the cover letter, polishing our pitch, etc. The mock interviews at the start of the semester also proved quite beneficial.

10.30 pm – 11.15 pm: The interviews start early tomorrow, at around 8 am and go on till 3 pm. My first interview is at 8.30 am. I get the interview attire ready for the next day. I go for a short run. Shower, then drop off to sleep like a log. Can’t wait for the next day!