Analy ze T h i s !
Students, professionals need
‘data wrangling’ skills
It seems irresponsible
of business schools to
continue to teach a core
curriculum that does not
reflect the increasingly
central role of software
programming.
By Vijay Mehrotra
12
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As I write this, I am as usual frantically preparing for the new school year, which starts in just a
few short days. I am once again teaching exclusively
MBA students here at the University of San Francisco. This year, in addition to the core quantitative methods course and my longstanding applied
statistics elective, I’m also teaching a new elective
entitled “Introduction to Data Mining.”
All of our analytics courses for MBA students
are taught with a strong practical bent. Our core
MBA course is entitled “Spreadsheets and Business
Analytics,” and not surprisingly this course requires
students to be very hands-on with Excel in building
models and analyzing historical data. In addition,
because both of my electives for this fall place a
heavy emphasis on data analysis, both of them are
built around the JMP software from SAS Institute.
At this point, a short digression for a true confession: I have never liked computer programming.
It’s not that I’m not capable of doing this kind of
work – just ask me about the integration of GAMS
with Mathematica in order to run numerical experiments for my dissertation! – but the reality is that
programming is something that I do not for the most
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