Chaifetz School Expands One-Year MBA Data Analytics Consulting Project
The One-Year MBA program at the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business has recently expanded its experiential learning component to include a paid, nine-month data analytics consulting project.
The project pairs current One-Year MBA students with local business partners, along with a faculty facilitator from the Chaifetz School, as they work together to deliver real solutions to data-intensive problems. Each consulting team will have eight to ten students on average working with a sponsor organization.
“Our students are able to apply their data analytics skills to solve real world problems while getting exposed to organizational culture for a long duration,” said Palash Bera, Ph.D., interim associate dean for graduate programs at the Chaifetz School. “We have seen many students in this project get hired full-time by their sponsor organization after graduation once these organizations see the value of the students’ skills.”
After being paired with sponsor organizations and identifying the scope of the project, students spend about eight to ten hours a week on average working on the project, including research and learning analytics skills. At the end of the course, students prepare a high-quality report for the specific business problem and present a professional presentation to the business partner about the project findings.
Recent examples of data analytics projects handled by students in the course include obtaining new prospects for a business, mining text data to obtain consumer insights, predicting employee attrition based on job performance data and analyzing sales data to obtain consumer behavior analysis.
The six-credit hour course runs from the second week of September to the end of April each year, with a break in December.
Founded in 1910, the Richard A. Chaifetz School of Business at Saint Louis University has shaped the future of industry for more than a century. As one of the oldest business schools west of the Mississippi, the Chaifetz School has built a reputation as a leader in business education committed to innovation, inclusion and impact and recognized with eight undergraduate and graduate programs nationally ranked by U.S. News & World Report.