Carlson School’s Business Analytics Program Places 100% of Graduates—Again

Nearly every graduate from the Carlson School’s Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program is in high demand.

For the third time in the program’s four year history, 100 percent of MSBA graduates received job offers within 180 days of graduation.

“To have 100 percent placement in three out of the program’s four-year history is a remarkable accomplishment,” says Zuzana Hlavacova Gurung, director of master’s programs at the Carlson School. “We are very pleased that the learning being done in our MSBA program is applicable to the real-world work being done in businesses globally. Our students are leaving here with the skills they need to make a difference in business analytics.”

Top employers across the country have hired Carlson School MSBA graduates, including Amazon, Capital One, Facebook, Google, PayPal, and Target.

Graduating Professionals Skilled in Business Analytics

As demand for business analytics professionals grows worldwide, Carlson students graduate ready to take on the data challenges global companies face. The Carlson School curriculum offers a unique combination of business knowledge, technical skills, and data analysis expertise to prepare graduates to take on the data-driven challenges at companies around the globe.

Experiential learning opportunities are embedded in every semester throughout the entire one-year, 45-credit program. This affords MSBA students the opportunity to put the data skills they learn in the classroom to the test.

“In the curriculum we want to make sure students get a chance to apply what they learn in the classroom in the context of a real business with a real question and a real data set in a typical project time frame,” says Ravi Bapna, the Curtis L. Carlson Chair in Business Analytics and Information Systems.

Through the Carlson Analytics Lab, students use actual data from client companies, including some of the 17 Fortune 500 companies that call Minnesota home, from a variety of industries such as national retailers, manufacturers, healthcare, agribusiness, nonprofits and local governments.

In this learning environment, students help executives at their client companies make data-driven decisions that impact businesses. Throughout the projects students practice creative problem solving using data analysis and work to communicate the details in a clear manner. This combination of skills and experience position Carlson School students as ideal hires.

“The experiential learning aspect of the MSBA program is really what sets us apart,” Gurung says. “Throughout everything we do in our program, students are learning not just the theory but, just as important, how to derive business value from data analytics.”

Working Closely with World-Class Faculty

In the classroom, students learn from prestigious faculty who are at the top of their field. The majority of courses are taught by faculty in the Information and Decision Sciences department, consistently ranked among the top five in the nation for information systems education by U.S. News and World Report.

At the annual INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology in November, the IDS Department took home six total awards. Bapna was recognized as a Distinguished Fellow of the INFORMS Information Systems Society, one of the highest honors in the field of Information Systems, and he also won the Best Information Systems Paper Award in the major journal, Management Science. Carlson School professors also took home an early career award, the award for best PhD dissertation, and two papers received honors.

 “All of [these awards] are a testament to the quality of research that is done here at the Carlson School,” says IDS Department Chair Gedas Adomavicius. “This is one of the top conferences and to be honored with multiple awards is really amazing.”

Students join the MSBA program with an average of 3.5 years of professional experience, though about 20 percent of the students come directly from an undergraduate program.

With the one-year MSBA program, all students change their career trajectory and find jobs at top employers across the country.