Although every month has been busy since we started the MMA program back in September, March felt absolutely jam-packed. From practicum presentations to the MMA adversarial case competition to the start of the Spring term, it’s hard to believe how much we have accomplished in just 31 days!
We are now well past the halfway mark of the program, and I’m sure the next four months will go by just as quickly!
First half of March
In the first half of March, we were still in our practicum intensive period, so I was working (remotely) every day with Canadian Tire to solve an inventory management issue. My team and I spent the first week of March working to gain a better understanding of the problem we were facing. We spent a lot of time utilizing the tools we learned in the first term, such as Python, SQL, and Tableau, while also learning some new ones such as KNIME and Hive.
The second week we were preparing for our presentations. We had an hour-long presentation at Canadian Tire early in the week, where we presented in-depth details and analysis on our findings to an internal team of Canadian Tire data scientists and stakeholders.
The Friday presentation was the big one! We had five minutes to present a summary to all our peers, other project hosts, Rotman professors, and members from the MMA advisory board. We were presenting to well over a hundred people, which was definitely nerve-wracking!
It was great to hear about all the different projects my classmates are working on, and everyone did a fantastic job.
Second half of March
The following week marked the start of our Spring term. We were introduced to our new teammates with whom we will be spending the entire term completing projects. As much as I loved working with my group last semester (shout out Team 2!!!), I was excited to get to know a new group of people. We kicked off the term with the first-ever MMA adversarial case competition. We were given the morning to analyze some baseball-related data and spent the afternoon dueling it out with other groups in debate-style presentations. After a long day, I was thrilled that my group finished first place in the competition!
We have such a great group of people from a wide variety of backgrounds, I am so excited to work with them as the semester continues.
We had another great team-building exercise in the first week where we participated in an online escape-room-like adventure! It was tons of fun and it was really nice to work with my new team outside of school-related things. Another extracurricular activity we had in March was the reciprocity ring. It was a fantastic event where we learned how to leverage our resources, ask for help, and return favors to those in our network. Similar to the escape room, it was really nice to chat with my classmates about things other than school and it was heart-warming to see how willing everyone was to help each other out.
On top of all this, we started classes for our Spring term. It truly feels as though things are starting to come together: the modeling tools and techniques we learned in the first semester are being applied to business problems we are learning about this semester. I am enjoying all of our courses so far, but due to my background in engineering, I think my favorite is Leveraging AI and Deep Learning Tools in Marketing. It’s a bit more technical and we are learning about different deep learning architectures. It is crazy to reflect back on March and see how much we have done, especially because it felt as though the month passed in a blink of an eye.
The Master of Management Analytics is designed to give students the advanced data management, analytics, and communication skills needed to become an analytics professional.