Brandeis International Business School

What made you want to apply to the Brandeis MSBA program?

The fact that the MSBA program is fairly new has its advantages. I’ve been able to see how things change and how the program has grown. For example, the curriculum now includes intensive SQL and R content. This reflects how the business analytics world itself changes quickly, because a master’s degree program should always be designed to keep pace with the real world.

What did you do on your internship?

I had the chance to apply a lot of my skills on my summer internship at Amazon. These included using R to help managers clarify business value by digging into and transforming raw datasets, writing Python scripts to automate the task of eliminating formulas in weekly Excel reports and pushing the data in those reports onto Amazon’s remote database, and using machine learning to help Amazon predict top sellers in the newly launched sellers’ pool based on their performance in their first month. My internship applied and expanded on the skills and knowledge I gained from the MSBA curriculum, and Amazon hired me as a business analyst right after graduation.

What advice can you offer someone considering the MSBA program?

I’d say you’re heading in the right direction and you’re going to learn powerful tools to dig into and grow a business’s value. The MSBA at the International Business School is exactly the route you should take to arrive at your destination. Brandeis feels like a great library, but also a home. The great library provides you with the most relevant knowledge of the field you’re interested in, and the small home-like size of the program lets you stay close to everyone, no matter if it’s your teachers, peers or staff.