Pillars of Analytics Applied in MS Degree in Information Sciences and Technologies

The Master of Science (MS) program in Information Sciences and Technologies (IST) at Rochester Institute of Technology conducted a significant upgrade of its curriculum in 2013, aiming to better prepare its graduates for the new trends and challenges in the fast evolving IT computing industry. In particular, the upgraded MS program places a strong emphasis on data analytics, where all students in the program get an intensive training in data analytics foundation in our core courses. Students can then continue with advanced work in the Analytics Track to receive deeper theoretical knowledge in the field. In this paper, we report our experience of offering this analytics-centric curriculum over the past two years. We first formally define four pillars of analytics and trace the skills needed to support each pillar and the courses that provide those skills. We then describe the course experiences through a sampling of the projects completed by students in their course work. We also provide some student feedback on the course experience. We conclude with a discussion of the capstone experience and a sampling of capstone projects. We show the movement toward analytics in the capstone experiences, particularly since the program began in 2013. The positive course experience and the fast increasing number of capstone projects in the analytics area show strong evidence about the initial success of the analytics-centric curriculum.