The Institute’s Dr. Aric LaBarr and Dr. Michael Rappa were in Baltimore this week to talk in separate sessions at the Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) Annual Meeting. Dr. LaBarr participated in a panel with Satish Nargundkar (Georgia State), Bob McQuaid (Pepperdine), and Kirk Karwan (Furman), which focused on experiences and advice on how to include analytics in university curriculum. The session discussed software tools, preparing data for analysis, balancing the use off-the-shelf software with providing mathematical understanding of techniques, and the amount of teamwork and communication skill development, among other topics.
Dr. Rappa shared the dais with Dr. Gilvan Souza (Indiana University Kelley School of Business), who described Indiana’s analytics education offerings, including its newly proposed online master’s of business analytics. Two representatives from leading consulting firms, William Miller (Accenture) and Amber Morgan (Ernst & Young), shared their views on what employers are looking for in the analytics talent graduating from universities.