DSO 510 - Business Analytics

This class is for you who want to know the core of business analytics without too technical lesson

Professor is good but dry and 3 hours on a Tuesday night can be brutal. It useful class that introduces you to lots of tools

Tathagata Dasgupta is a great instructor and he is very engaging. Out of the 10 zoom sessions that we have had, there have only been 2 ocassions in which I felt that I didn't learn anything. Sometimes he goes through slides a bit quickly; but it is easy to teach yourself the material given that his slides are highly organized and have very useful content. The first midterm was very doable and the HW is very manageable given that it is worth 20%. In addition, his TA has been very helpful and is an active participant in our learning.

It is somewhat of a catchall course for Analytics. It attemps to brush along most techniques that are standard in an analytics toolbox. This particular one was offered online on Saturday mornings, hence seemed to be popular with Online/PT MBA folks. Dasgupta started off with a lot of passion, but it tempered a bit later, perhaps matching the energy of the class... He knows his stuff though, and is very experienced with on-the-ground analytics problems, especially in supply chain, logistics, operations, and the like. One thing to keep in mind when selecting which instructor to take the course with is the tool they will use to teach it. Dasgupta taught it with this add-on to Excel called Frontline Solver, which is insanely easy to use, but think about whether you will have access to it in the environment you will work in. It makes for a great foundation to take other DSO courses, and is requisite for the certificate. Dasgupta is a kind soul, makes the class fun (as much as it could be in an online setting), and is very approachable, while taking the class serious. It can be an easy A.

A useful course, a bit of a disadvantage being that my class session is on Saturday mornings. The course is worth taking and the professor was excellent in allowing flexibility with Zoom sessions, etc. The professor is an industry professional and brings his learnings into the course often. The structure is a bit confusing but the Analytic Solver applications are great.

If you are interested in learning Python, this class helps. That said you do not need to use python to get through the class, just excel.

Took this course to learn some data modeling in R but spent most of the time durimg case reviews which is not a point of the DSO class. The professor is a nice person but she is new,hence has limited idea about what is the appropriate workload. We have 4 case review assignments that each take 4-5 hours to complete, 2 exams and 2 group projects (5 deliverables each). Not worth the effort. Very limited learning!

It was more like a case discussion class. The professor was nice and tried to be engaging but did not really teach technical skills in the course. You have to learn by yourself since his pace was really fast in class. What's worse was that he did not follow his syllabus and I had a hard time finding specific topics in the recordings.

The professor is very engaging and tries his best to cater to everyones different skill levels. However, he does go pretty fast through the code. Agreed with the comment that it's not technical enough for a technical person but too technical for a non-technical person.

The professor is engaging and tries to maintain a balance between learning specific skills and learning to develop a business mindset and ask the whys. The course load feels like a bit much though for someone who is trying to learn these skills for the forst time

This is kind of an odd course because it combines very general "why does data matter" type material with very specific skills (Python, Gephi, R, etc). The workload isn't too heavy and there are no exams, which is nice. A lot of class time is spent going over how to run code I know I will never apply in "real life" and will not be tested on, but I guess it's kind of nice to have a general sense of what someone more specialized might do. Probably not technical enough if you are a very technical person, and probably too technical for others.

The professor is very kind and patient with students who are not the most knowledgeable and is an engaging speaker. This course is in a weird spot because it tries to cater to both those who know analytics to some level and those who don't. Aside from the first assignment there isn't a lot of homework.

I come from a tech background and have done a lot of analytics work in the past, so no real value-add here. I learnt more in data science class than in this class.

Great class to learn Python, gephi, tableau, SQL. It is also part of STEM certification. The professor runs fast and relies on help session to teach you the tools and programs. The HWs are time consuming. This class doesn't have exams.

It's great to atleast have a working knowledge of SQL, Python, Tableau in current business scenario. This course provides it all. It's also STEM. Prof is incredibly invested into making sure you derive value from the course. But I definitely would not recommend the course if not for the Professor.

*High workload*, but high value class. Based on older peer evaluations, I would say this class's value highly depends on the professor. Mohammed is an engaged and passionate prof that wants to make sure that you learn. He's also receptive to feedback.

Do yourself a favor and don't take this course. This is the worst class I've taken at Marshall, and it's not even close. I only took it to complete the Graduate Certificate in Business Analytics--if that requirement didn't exist, no MBA in their right mind would take this course. It's a 3 hour night class where roughly 2/3 of the time is spent on dumb presentations and uninspiring cases that no one reads until you're asked to answer questions about them. Deliverables almost every week. Midterm was an absolute joke. Seriously, don't take this class.