The month of September was one heck of a ride. This intense period had us go through a series of classes, career coaching, networking events, initiation of club activities, assignments, exams and ending with the practicum kick-off and Datathon.  

The intro term continues!

I would say it was definitely intense, but the learning experience was worth the time and effort and truly set the vibe of masters in a business school. We continued our intro term subjects from the month of August to September. These broadly consisted of mini-MBA i.e., strategy, operations, marketing, finance, and human resource management. In parallel, courses like Data-Based Management Decisions, Analytics in Management and the bootcamps in SQL, R, Python and statistics provided the right blend of analytics and business knowledge.

However, my favorite subject of the September month was the Analytics Practicum which was taught by Professor Dmitry Krass. It brought together all the learnings of the intro term into one whole management analytics subject. With this subject we learnt 3 key aspects: Understanding the managerial problem and structuring it as an analytical problem, designing a plan to create the analytical data set and finally preparing a detailed analytical project proposal. Now, this might sound intimidating. Well, it is, because no longer can we turn back to our naïve ways of jumping straight into the prepared datasets ever again, which is a key skill required in the industry.

Career coaching kick-off

Meanwhile, our career coaching also kicked off with our lovely coach Diana Byers. Most of us come as confused MMAs from the perspective of job search. Throughout the month we were thoroughly guided to discover the industries and job roles of our interest as well as how to build professional connections, build resumes and tailor cover letters for job applications. These were accompanied by various company webinars and alumni talks which provided us so much clarity about the whole job search process. 

In my opinion, this month is also a great time to start reaching out to people on LinkedIn and doing coffee chats as much as you can. If you don’t know how to start or are stuck at any point, or just feel nervous to do coffee chats, reaching out to the career services team and your career coach would be my advice. Having said that it is also advised that you take the wheel in your hand and start networking independently. The sooner you learn who to reach out and how to build impressions, the better, with the prospective of getting a referral for the job or the company you like. 

Having fun with the clubs

Rotman has a wide variety of clubs ranging from industry clubs, cultural clubs to social clubs. It was hard to choose from so many options. I went with the three clubs which are also very relevant to the MMA students: the Rotman Business Analytics Club, the Management Consulting Association and the Healthcare Management Club and I wish I had the time to join a lot more.

I would recommend each student joins at least one club. Clubs are an integral part of the essence of the business school and provide opportunities to socialize and network, and thus making sure you utilize the extensive network that Rotman is highly known for.

Ending the month of September with a bang!

The last weeks of September started with the first peak of exams. It was nerve-wracking, especially for me since I didn’t have much of a business background and the courses which we had exams for were about the courses taken in the mini-MBA format. However, it was a truly good learning experience for someone like me who can move forward from the technical skills to learning how to implement those in a business setting to provide true value.

We also got to deploy the knowledge we gained over the intro term in the MMA Datathon for building a managerial and analytical solution for improving road safety for Toronto Police.   

Finally, and most importantly, we got our practicums assigned! With a curated list of 17 practicum companies which consisted of big banks, healthcare and marketing firms and many more, I would consider the students of the MMA program to be extremely lucky to get a chance to work with such big companies. We had elaborate presentations from each practicum hosts and every project is so good that you would ideally want to work on every one of them. 

Social gatherings in the beautiful fall

Well yeah! The beauty of the MMA program lies in the diversity combined with the essence of the business school. You would get to meet so many people, each bringing their own great experiences which will help you become wiser and more knowledgeable. I can guarantee you, that this experience would give you friendships that would last a lifetime and connections that could highly lift you up professionally. 

Our in-person classes were about to begin in October so everyone was super excited to see each other and attend classes like they should be. So, we ended September with an MMA get together, which was honestly a hard one to pull off since we have a class of 65, but we did manage to do, and it was amazing! Below is a little peak of one of our social meets:

If you love data science and analytics as much as I do, you will truly enjoy the program and would wish it was longer. And don’t worry, you would be in extremely good hands. The academic staff and the faculty are super kind and helpful. All we need to do is go with the flow, put in the effort and make sure to get the most out of our master’s experience. 

The Master of Management Analytics is designed to give students the advanced data management, analytics and communication skills needed to become an analytics professional.