The MDS Business Track

Kerry Back

Overview

6 half-semester courses
Marketing I and II in fall (BUSI 711/712)
Finance I and II in spring (BUSI 721/722)
Operations I and II in summer (BUSI 731/732)

Marketing I

Intro to key data-driven marketing concepts
- Market research, new product launches, customer segmentation and targeting, loyalty programs, pricing, online advertising.
- Case analysis and quantitative tools.
Course designed and videos by Arun Gopalakrishnan, Assistant Professor of Marketing
Course delivered by John Franklin, Lecturer in Management

Marketing II

Deeper dive into data-driven approaches to marketing questions
Topics include churn forecasting, designing surveys, segmentation, and positioning.
Software used includes Excel, JMP Pro 16, and Python.
Same instructional team as Marketing I

Finance I

Intro to investments, including analysis of corporate investment projects
- Loan calculations and retirement planning
- Markets, assets, and statistical properties of returns
- Efficient portfolios of assets
- Corporate investment projects
Taught by Kerry Back (https://kerryback.com)

Finance II

Quantitative equity investing
- Return prediction by machine learning from company characteristics updated daily in a SQL database
- Paper trading via python API at Alpaca Markets
Futures and options markets
- Risk management and investing
- Pricing models
https://busi721-901.kerryback.com and https://busi722-901.kerryback.com

Operations I

General introduction to operations management
- Process Analysis
- Inventory Management
- Queuing Theory
- Supply Chain
- Statistical Process Control
Taught by Christopher Burke, Lecturer in Management

Operations II

Project based course
- Build an end-to-end data-driven solution for optimizing wind farm operations in the energy sector.
- Apply mathematical modeling and optimization techniques to real-world energy supply chain problems.
- Students work in teams, collaborating on a shared GitHub repository.
Taught by Gibby Dunleavy, Lecturer in Management