From the Professor's Desk

I’ve been asked enough times by current or prospective students about how the Business Analytics concentration in the business school compares with Computer Science (C.S.) that I thought it was time to post about it to make the answer easily accessible. I will first give (very terse) definitions of C.S. and Business Analytics, and then compare them. C.S. is the science and art of writing high-quality code, usually to solve problems or build applications at a “production quality” level, i.e. good enough to be deployed for many people to use in many ways. (I’m no defining “good”, “quality”, “many”, etc., since that would require a book, not a post; I’m also ignoring the hardware side of C.S.) Business Analytics (as the very name implies) is designed to give people headed into a business career the tools to consume data and make better business decisions. These skills are critical in any data-driven industry, e.g. finance, marketing, retail, logistics, sports, etc. (I personally thi...