We sat down with Rafif Srour Daher, Academic Director of the program, to find out more about the field, the types of courses in the program, and the career opportunities for graduates.
What is Data and Business Analytics?
Data and Business Analytics is an interdisciplinary field that combines statistics, mathematics, and programming to extract useful information from data—insights that help us make better decisions.
We are combining it with the Bachelor in Social and Behavioral Sciences, so we’re bringing together students from two different profiles in order to enrich their experience. The first year, what we would like to do is to actually give the students from the Bachelor in Data and Business Analytics a context in which they can use all the hard skills they’re gonna learn.
What do I mean by this? They will be taking courses in Introduction to Social Sciences, Behavioral Sciences, Business Management, this way, they are able to learn the language, or the context, in which they will be applying their knowledge once they graduate.
The first semester of the last year, we bring the students back together so they can work on their final project. After those four years, we see how the two groups can actually work together. So they start their programs together, split up, then come back together to wrap it up.
What kind of career opportunities can a graduate of this program expect?
The career opportunities essentially fall under five different categories. You can become a data science generalist, and this is where most of the job market is, which means they will be hired by a company that is not necessarily a data company, but that’s looking for people who truly understand data so that they can gain insights from that data and make the best use of it.
However, they can also become business intelligence specialists, data architects, data mining engineers, and much more. So you can go far with this kind of degree. The fields or applications of the topic are quite tremendous. You can work for government agencies, businesses, health centers, etc.
What does the ideal candidate for this program look like?
We’re looking for candidates who are curious and who have critical thinking and analytical skills. It’s a degree that involves lots of statistics and mathematics. We’re really looking for those individuals who are driven to harness the power of data in order to make impactful decisions.
