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The Online Master of Science in Business Analytics

Data science and analytics comprise the modern language that is helping to direct the future of business. The data scientists and business leaders who understand this language, and who can render its fundamental patterns into actionable insights, have a unique power to redefine corporate strategies, enhance agility and improve profitability.

At William & Mary’s Raymond A. Mason School of Business, we offer an Online Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) that is designed to help pioneering professionals embrace the power of data analytics and evolve their expertise in business.

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Business Analytics Certificate

Online MSBA by the Numbers

#21

Online MSBA Program¹

32

Credits

8

Core Courses

2

Prerequisite Courses

1

Pre-Program Course

Gain a Competitive Advantage

William & Mary faculty designed our online master of science in business analytics program with a singular goal in mind: to give you an unmatched competitive advantage in the workplace. Our master’s program blends the technical rigor you expect from a graduate analytics program at a top-ranked university with the strategic business insights you need to communicate productively with stakeholders.

As Faculty Director Joe Wilck says, “It is not enough to just know business analytics methodologies. You and your organization need problem solvers who can take data from chaos to clarity.”

Our expert faculty—terminal degree holders who have worked in cybersecurity, information technology, telecommunications, healthcare, marketing, manufacturing, oil and gas, and the Department of Defense—weave the theme of business intelligence and analytics throughout the online program. You will learn about the value of big data and the ethics of working with algorithms as well as how to manage teams, communicate solutions and steer data-driven decision-making.

The concept of business intelligence and analytics is introduced prominently in our core course BUAD 5112 Competing Through Business Analytics. In this course, you will learn how to:

Integrate analytics into business processes
Visually convey insights from complex data sets in a straightforward, digestible way
Identify the most difficult and time-consuming steps of business processes
Create graphs with Python programs using the Matplotlib package
Create an analytics presentation with graphs you have created
Program two heuristic algorithms in Python
Web scrape

This course, and the master’s program as a whole, will challenge you to synthesize your technical and strategic learnings so you can champion the importance of business analytics at any company.

Video Transcript

Speaker 1:
This program was designed in conjunction with our advisory board, with the mindset of what does industry need. Other programs may have technical courses, but I feel like our courses are taught by faculty that are very strong technically that translates into very rigorous experience in the classroom as far as using these techniques and understanding what lies underneath it.

Speaker 2:
The professional workforce is moving more towards a tech centric and a data centric environment. And so having skills where you can code an R on Python, and also develop on visualizations using Tableau, and managing data using Alteryx, and optimizing models using the Gurobi are very useful in the current state of the art mentality. However, our curriculum goes beyond that. We give you a foundation in those skills, but also in the knowledge so that as those softwares change, you'll be ready and you'll be a lifelong learner, but also lifetime relevant in the field.

The ability to take this program online allows us to draw a diverse set of students that bring different industry and different work experiences in different educational backgrounds to the table. It basically raises the level of the conversation. It's very much more professional. It's very much more, "How can I apply this to my business? And "Oh, that worked in your business. Well now, let's apply it to my business and see how that will work." It just raises the maturity. It raises the skills. It raises the thought for how we can compete through business analytics.

What Our Students Say

In Competing Through Business Analytics, we developed essential skills—the ability to visualize data and to use it to persuade clients—that would serve us in class, our eventual jobs and, more pertinently, our job interviews.

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AUDREY LOW

MSBA ’19 CANDIDATE

More From Audrey

From Data to Insight: Behind Our Curriculum

William & Mary's Online MSBA program is designed to maximize your computing and modeling skills while honing your ability to apply data science to strategic business planning and business decision making. The program curriculum revolves around four dynamic pillars, and mastery of these pillars helps ensure that you graduate with a tangible advantage in a high-demand field, where opportunities are growing across industries and around the globe.

Explore the learning outcomes of these four pillars:

Business Acumen: Solve business problems while considering the critical needs of the business and its existing processes, strategy, and organization; share results ethically with respect to customer and client confidentiality
Math Modeling: Build technical skills as you develop algorithms that solve problems with speed and accuracy, select appropriate methodologies to solve a problem, and construct error-free models and analyses
Computing Technologies: Program effectively in R and Python, use data wrangling to cleanse data and render it more effective in solving business problems, and effectively manage databases
Communicating With Impact: Create and deliver digestible presentations and business data visualizations to audiences less familiar with the intricacies of analytical processes

These business analytics skills will guide you in asking the right questions, building the right models and using those models to perform the right analyses. The resulting insights, when appropriately interpreted and communicated, will give you the means to transform business outcomes by telling the right story, in the right way.

Plan Your Path Toward Success

The Online MSBA program pushed me to technical and academic achievements far beyond those I would have ever thought myself capable of reaching. Computer vision is a perfect example of a skill that most MSBA programs don’t cover, and a way in which William & Mary stands out at the absolute top of the pack.

TED HALLUM

MSBA ’20

See just how many career opportunities you could unlock with the Online MSBA—you might be surprised by the possibilities that await a tested data science professional.

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Online MSBA Courses Overview

At the intersection of our four pillars—business acumen, math modeling, computing technologies and communicating with impact—are the talents and advanced tools every data scientist may need for a successful and profitable career in business analytics. Our business analytics curriculum prepares you to master exactly these.

Our 32-credit curriculum can be broken down into the following three types of courses:

2 prerequisite courses
1 pre-program course worth 0 credits
8 core courses, worth a total of 32 credits

Prerequisite Courses (8 credits)*

BUAD 512A: Probability and Statistics with R (4 credits)

This course introduces the R programming language to teach statistical analysis within a business environment. The course will cover basics of data management and wrangling in R, probability and probability distributions, and statistical techniques including statistical inference, hypothesis testing, analysis of variance, and an introduction to regression analysis.

BUAD 512B: Business Modeling with Python (4 credits)

This course covers the use of the Python programming language in the context of modeling business problems. Particular attention is given to learning the power and flexibility of using Python in business settings commonly encountered. The mechanics, syntax, and semantics of the language is emphasized. The course includes in-depth coverage of Python data types, control flow, functions, packages, data wrangling, data visualization and matrix manipulation.

Pre-Program Courses (0 credits)

Excel Boot Camp (0 credits)

Completion of this course ensures that students have sufficient skills in Excel. This non-credit course will be available in Canvas throughout the program for students' reference as needed.

Core MSBA Courses (32 credits)

BUAD 5112: Competing Through Business Analytics (4 credits)

This course will include a survey of the state-of-the-art in business analytics, exploring how companies use it for competitive advantage, and identifying factors for successful strategic and operational support as business intelligence tools. Topics will include business metrics used for performance measurement and incentives, effective information communication, visualization, process improvement, the development and application of algorithms, and ethical implications. The course will also include a series of opportunities for problem-solving using business analytics in different areas of an organization, such as operations, supply chain management, human resources, finance and marketing.

BUAD 5052: Decision Modeling (4 credits)

Decision modeling provides a framework on how to develop models that improve decision-making under uncertainty. Using a variety of statistical techniques, students will learn how to apply decision models within a variety of business contexts. The topics include: discrete choice models, simulation models and forecasting models.

BUAD 5772: Database and Data Warehouses for Business Intelligence (4 credits)

This course covers fundamental topics related to developing and using databases and data warehouses to provide business intelligence (BI). The course includes: in-depth coverage of structured query language (SQL), stored programs, and database design and implementation, data warehousing concepts, dimensional modeling (star schemas), the extraction/transformation/load (ETL) process, and online analytical processing (OLAP)/ BI functionalities. As a final project, students build a small data warehouse, populate it with data, and create a dashboard to analyze and communicate the data to a broad audience.

BUAD 5122: Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics (4 credits)

This course is designed to provide students with a deep understanding of the theory and practice of supervised and unsupervised learning, including regression, classification, and clustering. An important part of this course is the use of statistical software, which is used extensively in labs and assignments in this class and may reappear in other classes throughout the program.

BUAD 5092: Optimization and Prescriptive Analytics

Optimization is a prescriptive analytics methodology designed to yield the best solution to a given problem. This applied optimization course will examine optimization through a business analytics lens. Students are exposed to the theory and application of optimization, including linear programming, nonlinear programming, discrete optimization, specialized networks and heuristics. Students will develop an understanding of algebraic formulations, develop spreadsheet model prototypes and use large-scale optimization software to solve challenging business problems.

BUAD 5132: Big Data and Cloud Computing Technologies (4 credits)

This course is designed to provide students with a deep understanding of big data and cloud computing. The data storage and retrieval techniques that have served the information processing industry for decades have proven inadequate in the face of the huge collections of data. Businesses are requiring a new set of technologies that are specifically designed to deal with these huge data sets. This course will focus on applications of big data and cloud computing techniques that will be used to process large-scale data sets.

BUAD 5802: Artificial Intelligence Applications for Business (4 credits)

This course focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) applications in business, and covers implementations of contemporary AI techniques, such as Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, and Planning for solving business problems.

BUAD 5762: Business Analytics Capstone Project (4 credits)

This experiential-based practicum course will include a comprehensive business analytics project that students will complete in small work teams. The projects will be hosted by businesses, government, or non-profit organizations. The students will complete the project from start to finish integrating the skills that have been acquired from the previous course work in the business analytics program. They will define and frame a complex problem, develop a systematic approach to solving it using analytics, identify methodologies that are suited to the problem, quickly prototype solutions with those methodologies to identify the best approach and, ultimately, generate an innovative solution and persuasively convey that solution using data visualization techniques and communication skills.

*Note: BUAD 512A and 512B are prerequisites for the remainder of the program. Students may be able to satisfy these prerequisites with courses from other sources, and they should inquire about their eligibility during the admission and onboarding process if they wish to do so.

Video Transcript

Monica Tremblay:
So companies all have data, but what they need is information. So what we teach in the MSBA is how to take that data, clean it, process it, analyze it, and then tell the story that's behind that data.

So one of the projects that we do in my database and data visualization class has to do with Medicare claim. And we take these claims and we try to understand 30-day readmissions. So we organize and clean the data that wasn't created with the purpose of figuring out 30-day readmissions, it was created with the idea of billing. But we take that data and we organize it, we calculate what a 30-day readmission looks like, which patients were admitted after 30 days, and then we do data visualizations to try to figure out patterns in those readmissions with the goal of hoping hospitals minimize those readmissions.

Joe Wilck:
One of the examples of how we bring business back into the curriculum, in the machine learning courses, we spend a lot of time talking about recommender systems. Recommender systems are all around us, whether it's Amazon telling you, "Add this to your cart since you have these other things in your cart," plus your prior purchase history, or whether it's LinkedIn saying, "Connect with this person because they're a friend of a friend," or whether it's Netflix telling you to watch this movie.

Now we've all experienced recommender systems as customers, how can we use those and how can we build those so that they can be taking that data very quickly and then analyzing it very quickly so that within one second, we can provide that back to the customer. We can tell them, "Hey, buy this," or "Link up with this person." That's what we cover in the machine learning class and that's relevant to all businesses.

Many of our faculty come from an engineering or STEM background. And in many of those types of programs you have a Capstone Project that culminates the end of your education, whether at the undergraduate level or at the master's level. So for us, it seemed natural to have a capstone project, to showcase the student's abilities from start to finish. Finding the business problem, setting goals, exploring the data, setting up a system to collect the appropriate data, developing models, using programming and other techniques they learned in the program. Then actually coming up with ways to visualize those findings and then make recommendations and hopefully deliver value. The Capstone course and the Capstone Project provide that opportunity to the student to do that with a real world client and get real world feedback. It's a resume booster, just a way to show that you are a data science and business analytics professional.

The Online Business Analytics Program at a Glance

Complete in as few as 15 months^**
100% online
No residency or on-campus requirement

3 starts per year: August, January and May
Earn your master’s degree from a prestigious business school
Study with our faculty of industry experts

^{**Students who are required to complete the prerequisite courses can graduate in as few as 18 months.}

Want More Insight?

Take a look at what’s ahead in the Online MSBA program—download our program details guide, your one-stop document for admissions requirements, courses and more.

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Discover Our Online Experience

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Meet W&M Faculty

The Workplace Value of the Online Master’s in Business Analytics Degree

Master Critical Thinking and Data Analytics Online at W&M

Master Critical Thinking and Data Analytics Online at W&M

Master Critical Thinking and Data Analytics Online at W&M

Video Transcript

Joe Wilck:
I consider the MSBA to be the MBA of the 21st century. Many professionals today have the technical aptitude, and then there are other professionals that have the communications aptitude. But it's the combination of those two skills that is really lacking in today's industry. And that is what our degree is trying to provide. Someone who can do the business acumen and communicate that value, but also has the technical skills to develop that value. We call those unicorns. And in the data science and business analytics field, that is what we're trying to produce.

Monica Tremblay:
What's great about the MSBA at William & Mary, is that it sits at the intersection of critical thinking, problem solving, and data analytics. And that's the sweet spot that I think employers are looking for. It's not enough that you have the skills to analyze data, but you also have to know what to do with it and what it leads to. And we live in a world or a sea of data, you could go many paths. But how do you land on those things that are important? And that's where critical thinking and problem solving comes in.

Joe Wilck:
So our program is unique in that we have two courses in machine learning, a course in artificial intelligence, a course in optimization, a course in databases, and follow on courses for our capstone. Most programs teach you R and Python as part of the curriculum. We require it before you get to the curriculum. So we're able to take you further technically, but also that allows us to actually show you how to use these skills in a business sense. These skills can help you at any point of the company, whether you're at the analyst role, the manager role, or the executive role.

Monica Tremblay:
So in today's world, almost everything is data-driven. It's no surprise that the largest companies in the world right now are data companies. Amazon is a data company. Google is a data company. Facebook is a data company. So companies are now having to make their decisions based on data.

Joe Wilck:
Our program is designed to be relevant for a number of different people, whether you're someone who is a seasoned professional, but you're looking to transition into a data science or a business analytics role, so you're just looking to add that technical expertise onto you're already well-established business acumen. For someone who does not have a lot of experience, but realizes they want to be in that technical role, so they're trying to get a master's degree to kind of get a seat at the table if you will. Then there's another group where they're looking to be a manager or a leader, and perhaps they already have an MBA, but they need more technical expertise to help drive and deliver value for their business and to manage their teams.

We are teaching you skills and knowledge and a foundation that will not only help you in the job market, but also help your company on the stock market.

Today’s corporate leaders are increasingly challenged to find qualified employees who understand data analytics and have proven experience applying its key business functions. Those who could fill this need must be familiar with unstructured data dumps, machine learning, data visualization tools and current analytics tools, but they must also be able to interpret the information acquired through these means and effectively communicate its implication(s) for the organization's bottom line.

By weaving our curriculum's four key pillars of business acumen, math modeling, computing technologies and communicating with impact into each of our Online MSBA courses, we blend the essential elements of business expertise with a robust portfolio of data science offerings. The result is a dynamic program with real-world applicability that ensures our students graduate with a thorough understanding of how to effectively apply their findings and communicate their insights in a succinct, coherent manner.

WHAT OUR STUDENTS SAY

What brought me back to school was kind of looking at the changing landscape, professionally. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into computer science or statistics, strictly one of those two, nor did I feel like the general approach of an MBA was right for me either. I like the intersection of the two, which is what led me to business analytics. There are a lot of possibilities.

ANDREW LIEBERMAN

MSBA ’18

Redefine the Bottom Line With an MS in Business Analytics Online

36%

Growth for data science jobs projected through 2031²

#3 Best Job in America

Data Scientist³

$120,000

Median base salary for data scientists³

27%

Percent of data science roles requiring a master's degree⁴

2.7 Million

job openings expected by 2020 for U.S. data professionals⁵

Meet Our First Online MSBA Cohort

William & Mary’s Online MSBA program welcomed its first cohort in spring 2018, and we quickly discovered that our student demographics mirrored the personal and professional diversity that is common in the fields of technology, data analytics and programming. While some of our current students have highly technical backgrounds, others come from financial, educational and even military ones. They represent varied sociocultural contexts and reside in geographic locations across the country. It is telling, then, that our program has managed to meet each of these driven individuals where they are, and that they’ve found it able to help them advance their technical and managerial development.

Take a look at the story told by our cohort demographics, and consider what you could learn not only from our master os science in business analytics program curriculum and faculty but also from such a diverse cohort of peers.

Not interested in our Online MSBA? Check our our one-year residential MSBA program..

A Closer Look at Cohort No.1

30% U.S. minorities
15% W&M alumni
5 average years of work experience
3.3 average undergraduate GPA (on a 4.0 scale)
62% ages 26-45
15% work in educational services
15% work in financial services
15% work in technology

^{NOTE: Statistics are based on cumulative self-reported W&M Online MSBA student profile data collected from the spring 2018 cohort.}

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What skills will you acquire in the online master’s in business analytics program?

Querying relational databases using SQL
Performing extract, transform, load (ETL) processes
Building data warehouses
Preparing data for analysis using data wrangling techniques
Managing data using services such as Hadoop, Amazon Web Services and NoSQL
Creating data visualizations and dashboards with Tableau
Performing descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analyses
Utilizing basic methodologies like regression, logistic regression, time-series analysis, Bayesian methods, etc.
Deploying a broad array of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques
Constructing and executing prescriptive optimization models
Analyzing data with statistical software including R
Writing computer programs in Python and R
Designing, programming and implementing heuristic algorithms in Python
Conducting simulation analyses
Distilling strategic insight from analyses and communicating it persuasively

Get to Know the Raymond A. Mason School of Business

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Feb

17

Priority Application Deadline

February 17th

Summer 2023 Term

Apr

7

Application Deadline

April 7th

Summer 2023 Term

May

8

Next Start

May 8th

Summer 2023 Term

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Sources

Retrieved on January 26, 2023, from usnews.com/education/online-education/college-of-william-and-mary-231624/rankings
Retrieved December 8, 2022, from https://www.bls.gov/ooh/math/data-scientists.htm
Retrieved December 8, 2022, from https://www.glassdoor.com/List/Best-Jobs-in-America-LST_KQ0,20.htm
Retrieved August 22, 2018, from pwc.com/us/en/library/data-science-and-analytics.html
Retrieved August 22, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2017/05/13/ibm-predicts-demand-for-data-scientists-will-soar-28-by-2020/?sh=726b70da7e3b

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