IEEE Spectrum June, 2013 - 21

RESOURCES_CaREERS

a Degree in Big DaTa
graduate courses are
springing up to Meet the
deMand for analysts

How can a car-sharing company figure
out the best spots to park vehicles, or an electric
utility forecast the demand for power? The solution today often involves crunching terabytes,
and sometimes petabytes, of data. Whether retail, telecom, or health care, businesses in almost
every sector are hoping to innovate and increase
profits by analyzing immense data sets.
Obtaining data is easy; it can come from a huge
variety of automated sources, including RFID
tags, mouse clicks, or sales receipts. And the analytic software systems-such as SAS Institute's
eponymous SAS and IBM's SPSS-that are required to work with this data are getting better,
says Michael Hasler, director of a new M.S. in
Business Analytics program at the University of
Texas at Austin. But what's missing are the people:
"You need to take these large unstructured data
sets, clean them up, and find insights, but there's
a shortage of talent to do that work," says Hasler.
By 2018, the United States is projected to face
a shortfall of as many as 190 000 experts who can
make sense of big data, according to the McKinsey
Global Institute. Universities are now trying to fill
the gap with advanced degree programs that
aim to produce graduates who can provide useful information and communicate it to business
leaders and clients. "Our fundamental goal is to
create storytellers," says Hasler, whose program
will begin its first class at the end of August. "After
a week's worth of work developing a data model,
they should be able to tell a 10-minute story about
the nugget of information that resides in the data."
The University of Texas is not alone as enterprises like Cisco, IBM, and Walmart have
iLLUstration by

Jesse lefkowitz

been urging universities to launch master's
programs in analytics in recent years. North
Carolina State University, in Raleigh, launched
the first such program in 2007. Northwestern
University, in Evanston, Ill., the only one to offer the degree through an engineering school,
welcomed its first class in 2012. And New
York University and the University of Michigan-
Dearborn, among others, are launching programs this year.
And the United States isn't the only country noticing a dearth of data experts. Deakin
University, in Melbourne, Australia, plans to introduce a master's program in business analytics this year with IBM's support. In the United
Kingdom and Ireland, the University of Warwick,
the University of Strathclyde, and University
College Dublin are among those offering business analytics master's degrees. The Indian
Institute of Science in Bangalore is the first
Indian university to launch a degree program,
but certificate courses are offered at the Indian
Institute of Technology in Mumbai and at a few
Indian Institutes of Management.
The programs, which typically run for one year,
combine knowledge from computer science,
statistics, and business, says Diego Klabjan,

director of Northwestern's M.S. in Analytics program. This focus gives students a more technical approach to problem solving than they would
get from an MBA program. "Inside a corporation,
a data scientist would work with a domain expert [say, in marketing] to make decisions datadriven," says Harry Chernoff, academic director
of NYU's business analytics program.
Students are generally required to have a
quantitative background, either through work
or through a bachelor's degree in fields such as
engineering, statistics, or economics.
The programs are opening up new careers
for students. For example, after earning a
bachelor's in industrial engineering, Scott
Albrecht worked for four years at an IT consulting firm. After reading about the shortage
of big data analysts, he applied to Northwestern's program, he says, and he's confident the degree will pay for itself. A sports
buff, Albrecht hopes to apply his passion for
analytics to sports, where there are opportunities for using big data in marketing and revenue as well as player performance evaluation.
For now, he's scored a hit: a summer internship with the Cleveland Cavaliers professional
basketball team. -prachi pateL

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2013