Curriculum

The program launches with a 2.5 day residency in Durham, NC.

Programming for Data Analytics

Build a foundation in R and Python to prepare for subsequent courses in your program that use these languages.

Applied Probability and Statistics

Examine a framework for data-driven decision making under conditions of partial information and uncertainty. You’ll acquire probabilistic and statistical tools for understanding, analyzing, and interpreting data, such as discrete and continuous probability distributions, linear regression, and time series.

Managerial Economics

Learn the fundamental concepts of microeconomics, such as pricing decisions, market equilibrium, strategic interaction, and asymmetric information, which will serve as a foundation for future courses in business such as finance, marketing, and strategy.

Business Fundamentals: Accounting and Finance

Cover the basics of financial accounting and finance. Determine the information requirements of a firm and the activities they take within the accounting system to address them. Gain a working knowledge of fundamental finance concepts and tools, such as Net Present Value, for analyzing investment and financing decisions of individuals and firms.

Business Fundamentals: Marketing and Strategy

Gain an overview of marketing and strategy and their roles in a business. Review issues and decisions involved in planning and managing activities, such as positioning, targeting, pricing, product development, distribution, customer behavior, and competitive activity. Learn concepts and skills to understand, craft, and support a firm's strategy.

Data Analytics and Applications

Develop deep insights into the modern analytics tools that aid in making data-driven decisions to generate positive business impact. Learn machine learning tools such as regression, classification, dimension reduction, clustering, and cross-validation to start incorporating cutting-edge techniques into your team's workflow.

An optional 2.5 day Leadership Intensive is offered in Durham, NC, after Term 2.

Digital Marketing

Assess the impact of the rapidly evolving communication and distribution channels in the context of digital technology and consumer migration to the Internet. You’ll consider advertising budgets shifting to display and search, and goods now positioned for online purchase, and review the associated key performance indicators and tools to use to improve the efficiency of digital marketing.

Financial Risk Management

Study key concepts of fixed income securities and learn how to calculate the return of a portfolio of securities as well as quantify the market risk of that portfolio, using the R programming language with Microsoft Open R and RStudio, to calculate Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). You’ll master these important skills for financial market analysts in banks, hedge funds, insurance companies, and other financial services and investment firms.

Advanced Data Analytics and Applications

Expanding on your Data Analytics & Applications course, study how the most modern data science tools using artificial intelligence can be tailored to address business challenges. Gain a strong foundation in modern trends involving tools such as natural language processing, image recognition, and large language models.

Operations Management

Understand and improve business processes, such as capacity planning, scheduling, queueing analysis, inventory analysis, and lean and six-sigma program implementation, through data analysis. Technology has enhanced the way that the data generated in these processes is collected and assessed to make more effective decisions.

Decision Models

Effective management requires recognizing when a decision is needed, what factors impact that decision, and choosing a path. However, many decisions are so complex that they are difficult to grasp fully, or the stakes are too high to learn by experience. Learn about decision models, or simplified representations of these situations that allow different scenarios to be evaluated for optimal business impact.

Fraud Analytics

Find out how quantitative analytic techniques combined with expert analysis can identify potentially fraudulent behavior. Once you’ve detected a new fraud pattern, quantitative techniques can help identify potential perpetrators and put corrective measures into place. In this course, you will explore analytics techniques currently in use to identify and prevent fraud in relevant business contexts.

An optional 2.5 day Data Visualization Intensive is offered in Durham, NC, after Term 4.

Empirical Analysis for Business Strategy

Gain exposure to the statistical techniques, primarily causal inference, used to evaluate business outcomes, as well as potential confounding factors and the quasi-experimental methods, such as instrumental variables regression, regression discontinuity, and difference-in-differences estimation, to mitigate their effects.

Navigating Organizations

Prepare to become a more effective leader and manager by learning how to motivate and coordinate individuals within an organization. Discover the systems and managerial skills that maximize an organization's performance within the context of modern leadership challenges.

Business Communication

Learn and practice techniques to communicate effectively--clearly, strategically, persuasively, and collaboratively--in a business setting. Hone your skills in team presentations by learning to present recommendations that hold up to challenges, present with one voice, structure for coherence, ask and answer questions, and enhance audience understanding of materials.

Ethics and Legal Issues in Business Analytics

Examine the legal, regulatory, and ethical frameworks that shape the use of data by firms. You’ll cover topics including privacy, data ownership, restrictions on data analysis, the effect of new technologies on business policy, and potential for biases. The course will use case examples to illustrate the dilemmas and challenges.