Data Wizards Get Their Diploma Here
Mathematics, mathematics and more mathematics. And then statistics, computational disciplines and data, a lot of data. Those who enroll in the Master in Data Science and Business Analytics of Bocconi University, directed by Alessia Melegaro, associate professor at the Department of Politic and Social Sciences , have a marked inclination for these subjects and for programming. "The program in fact draws its students from a different pool than the more classic programs at Bocconi," explains Melegaro, "these are young people interested in the use of advanced statistical and computational techniques aimed at the analysis of large amounts of data." And that they will therefore attend very technical courses, such as computer programming and database systems, business analytics, statistics, econometrics, and machine learning. "They come largely from our BEMACS program, but also from business studies or even from engineering, mathematics and physics". The program includes a first semester which attempts, through courses with a strong quantitative component, to standardize the theoretical bases of the students. Then, from the second semester, students can choose between two different paths: "The program is divided into two paths, a track in Data Science and one in Business Analytics, which share a common quantitative training and which can lead to common outlets, such as the choice to continue with a doctorate," continues Alessia Melegaro , "even if those who choose the track in Business Analytics will have a more applied course of study while the one in Data science will be more theoretical.
At the end of the journey, however, they will be in both cases well-rounded data scientists very good at programming, and will be able to make a decisive contribution within companies, organizations and institutions operating in a society where decision-making processes are increasingly data-driven.".
A strong point of Bocconi's Master of Science in Data Science and Business Analytics is its faculty: "A set of high-profile and wide-ranging teachers, who are constantly updated. There are those who have studied economics, some computer science, a few physicists... And the people who teach are the same ones who do research. Within the European panorama, ours is not the only example of a course with these characteristics," continues Alessia Melegaro, "but it is the one that goes deepest. It is a program that combines the business part with the disciplines of data science very well, and those who come out of here are graduates with great methodological skills". And companies, well before graduation, compete for them.