The Master of Science in Analytics (MSAN) program at the University of San Francisco is an innovative and challenging training program for developing future analytics professionals. We invite you to find out more about how your organization might benefit working with a group of highly motivated and committed students from this exciting graduate program.
We seek clients interested in working with one or more teams of students on an Analytics Practicum project. These projects are centered on creating business value from data and extend over several months.
Students have worked with Mozilla, SurveyMonkey, PayPal, and Thompson Reuters, among others.
What is the Analytics Practicum?
As a central part of our 12-month curriculum, USF's MSAN program provides training in the leadership, teamwork, communication, professionalism and project execution skills that are vital for analysts and data scientists to be effective in the business world. We teach our students these skills through lectures, readings, workshops, written assignments, and simulations.
But there is simply no substitute for experience. Throughout the program, our student teams work on a real project with real (and usually messy) data from a client organization. Our faculty also manages and mentors the students to ensure client success.
In short, these "Practicum Projects" give our students invaluable first-hand experience as analytics professionals, while providing clients with tangible benefits from their hard work, knowledge and discoveries.
What makes Practicum projects successful?
The MSAN program demands a great deal from its students, including a strong commitment to client success. In addition, we work very hard to make sure clients are committed to the success of their Practicum project. While there are no hard and fast rules, from our experience we believe the most successful projects:
- have a general goal for the client organization that is stated in business terms rather than technical terms
- have a significant volume of data available to support the analysis
- require students to work hard to understand the business context
- do not have an easy solution
- are of serious interest to the client company, and have an internal champion
How can your organization participate?
Students work from 10 to 15 hours a week for a company throughout their program (actually, 10 of their 12 months). Students can work as paid interns on your payroll or via a mutual NDA and data analysis agreement between your company and USF. A faculty member on our side typically acts as project lead with the students doing the work. We need someone in the client company that acts as a champion of the project, providing answers to questions, data, and so on. We usually work on a granularity of one semester but students have often continued with the same company through multiple semesters.
The first step is to discuss possible projects from your organization and how they might fit with the goals of the MSAN program. Professor Parr can provide additional information and answer any questions:
Professor Terence Parr
Analytics program director
415 422 5707
parrt@cs.usfca.edu
