Twenty LSU graduate students are on their way to earning a degree only offered at about five universities nationwide, according to Kenneth Koonce, dean of the College of Agriculture.
The Master of Science in Analytics degree will give students an opportunity to learn business skills needed to communicate with employers and how to make observations from large amounts of data, Koonce said.
“Analytics is a concept of being able to analyze, interpret and draw conclusions form massive amounts of data,” he said.
The degree is the brainchild of both the experimental statistics program in the College of Agriculture and the E.J. Ourso College of Business, and it’s aimed at students who have learned quantitative skills like economics, engineering and mathematics, Koonce said.
Students are paired with local businesses to get real-world practice analyzing and sharing their conclusions with administrators, Koonce said.
“They have to work together, not only as a team, but with the CEOs,” he said.
Jim Van Scotter, master of analytics adviser, said the University and state will benefit from the program for years to come. He said he expects the majority of the students to have job offers by graduation from the companies involved.
Nearly all of the students in last year’s pilot group were hired upon graduation, Van Scotter said.
Koonce said businesses have “billions of lines of information,” yet they do not know how to draw conclusions from the data. Armed with the degree and knowledge of analytics programs like SAS Institute, the students will be able to detect trends in healthcare, retail and even frauds in banking, Koonce said.
The University received a million dollar grant from SAS Institute to kick-start the program, and LSU is only the second school to be paired with the program, Koonce said.
Though only 20 students are enrolled in the 10-month program this year, Koonce said he expects 40 students to be enrolled in the coming years due to “tremendous interest” from businesses.
“It will bring us a lot more interaction with the business community,” Koonce said. “The businesses are going to get a lot more involved in LSU.”
Koonce said he not only predicts businesses will hire graduates, but they’ll also send their own employees to the University to earn the Master of Science in Analytics.
Van Scotter said the computer programs the students will learn will put them ahead of their competitors.
“LSU and the ISDS department, we try to be very proactive and keep up-to-date with the current techniques. This is the hottest thing that’s happened in the statistics and analytics world at this time,” Van Scotter said. “It’s not theoretical at all. It’s practical.”
