Overview

The mission of the Minor in Data Analytics is to provide a quality education in the field that combines theory and practice for undergraduate students equipping them with the blend of skills necessary to engage in data-driven decision making and allowing them to enter the work force – as an employee or a self-employed person –  or pursue graduate studies.

Program Objectives

The Minor in Data Analytics aims to provide students with:

• the skills to extract and formulate problems addressable by analytics.
• both the design thinking and programming skills necessary to deal with different stages of data analytics.
• a sufficient toolbox of methodologies to identify, select, deploy, validate, and communicate ethically appropriate solutions to analytics problems. 

Learning Outcomes

Graduates with a Minor in Data Analytics will be able to:

• clearly frame the relevant analytics problem statement and define metrics of success in the solution to the stated analytics problem.
• identify, merge, harmonize, rescale, and clean possibly disparate data sources.
• determine and apply appropriate solution strategies to a wide variety of analytics problems across multiple domains.
• document and report findings in a way that integrates professional, ethical, and social considerations with the goal of better decision making.

Curriculum

For a Minor in Data Analytics, students must complete a minimum of 18 credits, distributed as follows: 

• Core Courses (6 credits)
• Elective Courses (12 credits)

Core Courses (6 credits)

• BDA211   Introduction to Applied Data Analytics (3 cr.)

Students must choose one of the below courses:

• BDA311   Data Driven Design Thinking (3 cr.)
• BDA401   Methodologies and Model Building in Data Analytics (3 cr.)

Elective Courses (12 credits)

Four electives are to be chosen from the following¹:

Department of Information Technology and Operations Management

• ITM232  Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Analytics (3 cr.)
• ITM302  Data and Information Management (3 cr.)
• ITM402  Business Intelligence (3 cr.)
• ITM403  IT Project Management (3 cr.)
• MKT488 Topics in Marketing: Market/Consumer Analytics (3 cr.)

Department of Communication Arts

• JSC222 Digital Media Design (3 cr.)
• JSC224 Social Media (3 cr.)
• JSC314 Data and Society (3 cr.)
• JSC434 Data Journalism (3 cr.)

Department of Computer Science and Mathematics

• BIF244 Introduction to Script Programming (3 cr.)
• BIF524 Data Mining (3 cr.)
• CSC375 Database Management Systems² (3 cr.)
• CSC498 Topics in Computer Science: Data Visualization (3 cr.)

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

• COE418  Database Systems² (3 cr.)
• COE543  Intelligent Data Processing and Applications (3 cr.)
• COE544  Intelligent Engineering Algorithms (3 cr.)

¹ One of the elective courses can be BDA311 or BDA401 depending on the choice of the core. 

² Students can register in ONE of these two courses since they are equivalent to each other.