The newly founded Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University  (NCSU) at Raleigh, USA, is now offering an intensive 10-month Masters course with a practical and innovative curriculum. Its flagship programme is the  Master of  Science in Analytics (MSA), which focuses exclusively on the tools, methods and applications of data analysis.

The first batch of MSA students at Raleigh, including six from India, celebrated the midpoint of their course with the successful completion of the fall semester on December 7, 2007.

During the fall semester, the students took courses taught by a team of faculty spanning several disciplines.

Among the subjects covered were Time Series and Forecasting, Data Security and Privacy, Text Analytics, Customer Analytics, Geospatial Data Analytics, and Data Mining.

The term ‘advanced analytics’ covers a  broad  spectrum of activities, including data collection and integration; statistical methods; and complex  processes for enterprise-wide decision-making. As the use of analytics becomes more widespread, there is mounting demand for professionals with strong qualitative skills coupled with an understanding of how the techniques are applied to a variety of critical tasks facing decision-makers.  It is to help meet this demand that NCSU last year founded the Institute for Advanced Analytics, whose Master of Science course  has attracted much attention.

The new MSA course is both focused and practical in its orientation, with the aim of providing an education that is directly applicable to positions in industry – such as business intelligence analysts, optimisation and analytics specialists, and strategic analytics managers.

The MSA programme develops a strong aptitude in quantitative analysis, as well as teamwork and communication skills. A background in subject areas such as mathematics, statistics, computer programming, business and economics is a prerequisite.  Students gain hands-on experience with the same complex tools used in industry today. Team projects, where students are paired with industry partners to gain additional experience, are based on real analytical problems facing organisations today. 

The students taking the inaugural MSA course at Raleigh hail from several countries. One of the Indian students – at 24 years she is the youngest on the course – is Arundhati Balachandran.

Arundhati visited Chennai recently during her Christmas holidays and has since returned to Raleigh to resume her MSA programme. She sees NCSU as an institution that provides “the right and conducive environment for overall development.”

(For more information, visit the North Carolina University website www.ncsu.edu)