【留學】SMU MSBA fall modA 就讀體驗－emilyshasha的部落格

其實10月初就該寫這篇了，但忙著讀書一直沒有時間，趁著空檔來練習用英文寫每堂課的課程感想：

SMU MSBA curriculum is separated into two terms, one is fall term, another is spring term, each has modA and modB in each term, so far I'd finished both fall modA term and modB term. Classes in fall modA are basically building up students' basic knowledge about analytics, such as statistics, consulting classes are designed to help students who don't have statistic or finance background could have a better understanding of analytics.

1. Business Analytics consulting

This class is designed to build up students' foundation in business consulting, unlike normal consulting lesson which focus on the case study, BA consulting focus on the discussion about how big data would impact on traditional organizations, questions like is it essential for companies to implement on analytics? or what kind of developing methods, such as agile, waterfall, would be suitable for company to develop a new product? and how to use balance scorecard to evaluate a company's performance? Realizing the techinique of big data and be proficient in coding is important, but we should also know that the underlying reason of why and how should an organization follow the trend of analytics.

2. Data visualization

Visualization is an essential step in data processing, this step influences the result of the data analysis considerably, think of things that is described in words or in picture, people tend to focus more on graphs, tables, pictures or animations. Therefore, speakers should always ask themselves: Is this graph best suited to represent the result? Is there other way that can better deliver to the audience? These are questions that we should consider repeatedly, this class is taught by MSBA director, she is an expert in data visualization, during six weeks classes, she taught us several functions in Tableau, from the simplest Histogram, bar chart, tables to the most difficult, bubble chart, word cloud, line chart, boxplot, sankey diagram. In addition, each student was assigned to a group that will collaborate with a company to solve problems for company using Tableau or Alteryx. Not only do students make better graphs and integrate in dashboard, but also practice a lot on data cleaning, analyzing in the first place. Students who participated in this class would gain a lot of knowledge in data visualization, which combine theory with practice in six weeks, giving students abundant resources for future use in visualization and presentation.

3. Statistic

This class is for beginners who have not taken statistic before to understand the fundamental knowledge of data science. Statistic accounts for a big portion in the path for data science, without the understanding of hypothesis testing, p value, ANOVA, chi test, etc, we can't analyze data in an unbias aspect. So for people who had taken statistic before, this class may be too simple for them, but it is also a time to review the content again since statistic is an important subject with regard of every fields of study.

4. Business Metrics

According to the course syllabus, the specific course learning objectives can be summarized as:

1. Gain exposure to a diverse set of business metrics and develop an appreciation for using metrics in decision-making.

2. Develop an understanding for the contexts and types of business decisions in which specific metrics are most applicable.

3. Learn how to compute the critical metrics that impact product, market, brand, or customer management decisions.

For people who did not expose a lot on marketing before, this couse might be a bit difficult for them, since there are so many formulas to remember, for example, click through rate, cost per 1000 impressions, cost per sales, etc. But for people who would like to work on marketing analytics, realizing these metrics is an essential step. Professor requires each student to participate with a mock application, which did different activities, such as operating a convenience store(setting price), ordering commodities, organizing a concert(company management). I would say that I didn't do very well on the final exam although I remembered literally every formulas, the reason is that you should be very familiar with how to apply different formulas in different situations, not just remembered formulas, that is, marketing is a dynamic science which requires you to combine various knowledge of accounting, math and finance skill to tackle and analyze customers in a better way.

5. Programming

If you are expecting to gain all the coding skill through this class, then this is definitely not a choice for you, since programming is a skill you should realize before attending the class, before students start the class on August, they already have access to Datacamp, which teaches students R and Python from the scratch to the intermediate, therefore, professor expected students realized how to code in R and Python in the beginnig, what he taught is then separated into two parts, teaching R using R studio in the first three weeks and Python using Jupyter notebook in the last three weeks, we indeed cannot have a deeper understanding in just a few weeks, but professor actually gave us a lot of resouces and told us that we can start to focus on the part which we would like to study on by ourselves. For example, if you are interested in data visualization, you can start develop beautiful graphs using ggplot in R or matpotlib in Python. Programming is always a tool, what is important is the business or things you want to tell the audience after all.

寫了這麼多，還是不太習慣用英文打字，原本預計11月寫完這篇也拖到今天才完成，果然用不同語言打字還是有難度。