The Darden School of Business and University Data Science Institute unveiled a new dual degree program Monday intended to give students an edge in a business world increasingly driven by “big data” and analytics.
The program will allow Darden students to earn both an MBA and a master’s degree in data science in two years with a curriculum interwoven from the two programs.
“The goal is to take advantage of of the fact that Darden has a very powerful and effective program for educating general management,” said Ronald Brown, director of the Data Science Institute. “What we do is provide a deep dive in terms of the skills you need in order to be a professional data scientist.”
Since the Data Science Institute was launched in 2013, it has become a competitive program with the goal of giving students the tools to apply analytical solutions in a wide variety of disciplines.
“It’s ranked sixth by a number of rankings organizations in data science, which is pretty impressive given that there’s quite a few of them,” Brown said. “We’ve established that reputation in a year and a half.”
This dual degree comes as businesses from across a diverse range of industries demand MBA graduates with a strong understanding of big data analytics, artificial intelligence, programming and technology, according to Darden Prof. Rajkumar Venkatesan.
“Even traditional companies have a huge tech focus ... that means data and analytics-based decision making is going to become big across the board and we need to be prepared for that,” Venkatesan said. “The best students are the ones who have both the breadth of business understanding along with the depth of technology and analytics understanding.”
The announcement of the new dual degree program has already been met with positive response, despite a lack of formal advertising about it. The first cohort in the dual degree program this summer will consist of only five students, with plans to increase this number to 50 students in anticipation of a full launch by 2018.
“We have started admitting students, and we are in the process of finalizing their admissions already,” Venkatesan said. “We want to run it for one year [to] find what are the things that need to be fine tuned and changed before we can welcome the next cohort.”
The Data Science Institute already offers a dual degree with the Medical School as well, and plans to offer more dual programs across other schools at the University.
“In general, what we’ve been trying to do at the Data Science Institute is bring data science to bear in a number of [curricula],” Brown said. “We hope to soon have one with Nursing — a dual Ph.D. and MS in data science.”
Venkatesan was optimistic about the program and its impact on students.
“I think this goes to show the multidisciplinary nature of where U.Va. is headed in terms of research and also in terms of the curriculum,” Venkatesan said. “What we are doing at U.Va. is definitely getting ready for the next generation.”
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