Thursday, March 02, 2006

What jobs does a good data mining course land you?

I always love to hear from former students about the great jobs that they landed after graduating from the MBA program. It is especially great (and I must admit - surprising) when the data mining course they took at the Smith School was instrumental is getting that job.

Here's one of the more unusual stories (quoting from a former student's email):

"Just a couple weeks before completing the requirements of the program, thanks in no small part to what I learned [in the data mining course] ... I have accepted an offer for a dream job in the entertainment industry. Based on the analytical skills I cultivated through lessons on data modeling and analysis, and the analytical tools and techniques ... I have been selected by my company for a newly created position designed to help the nation’s largest concert promoter figure out how to optimize its booking strategy for major national tours. It’s about supplementing the intuition of industry experts and veterans with analytical insight, and introducing more method to the madness that characterizes the business side of Rock and Roll. Who said math and statistics isn’t cool?"

Any others out there with a cool story? Please post!

5 comments:

Galit Shmueli said...

That's cool Ernest - indeed keep us posted!

Ravi Bapna said...

galit, i had the pleasant surprise of hearing the same from adib a. and couple of other ISB (Indian School of Business, Hyderabad) students. they attributed the data mining course specifically to their landing multiple job offers from analytica firms. of course given how hot the indian job market is they probably could have landed these jobs the day they walked into ISB!...this is a maha cool blog. cheers. ravi bapna

SimpleSips said...

Prof. Shmueli, I was unbelievably surprised when I went on a job interview this past fall and was asked about discriminate analysis and logistic regression. I had no idea at the time what these models were and absolutely no idea of how to use them. Fortunately, I was still offered a position in the consumer insights department for this wine and spirit company. Even better...after speaking with my new boss about the tools and models I was learning in your course they bumped me up in position and salary. I'll be using many of the models you have taught us to analyze pricing effects and to better understand factors that lead to product purchase. Thanks for everything!!

Galit Shmueli said...

Melissa - thanks for the cool posting! It is indeed encouraging to see how much these skills are valued in the real world. I wonder where the others in that team acquired their knowledege on logistic regression and discriminant analysis models.

Maybe if you mention Naive Bayes you'll get to be the CAO (Chief Analysis Officer)???

We can't wait to hear about some of the projects that you will be running!

SimpleSips said...

It turns out that most of the MBA's that come into the company learned the techniques and models on the job. I will certainly keep you posted on the types of projects I end up working on!