Spotlight
“The content the program delivers is amazing. I can easily apply methods from class to my work. The relevancy is outstanding.“
-Class of 2019 Program Survey.
Congratulations, Class of 2019:
MS Analytics class of 2019 during their graduation celebration
The MS Analytics Program graduated it’s fourth cohort this past spring semester. A total of 55 students arrived at Houston CityCentre to partake in their capstone project presentations and a graduation celebration afterwards. “I can’t believe it’s been five semesters. I remember the day when I showed up in this building and didn’t know anybody. Now, we all leave as one big family–an Aggie family” said one of the graduates of the program. The program is designed to teach students to apply methods to solve problems using data, and to ultimately predict the future. Each student is assigned a faculty member or a subject matter expert that serves as the project coach. Throughout five semesters, the students and coaches meet in an effort to produce a predictive model. The projects range across many different industries: Oil and gas, healthcare, retail, hospitality, eCommerce, marketing among others. Congratulations, Aggies!
Transformational Story:
Diego Molinari ’18
Diego is a reservoir engineer working at an Oil and Gas company in the Advanced Analytics and Emerging Technologies (AAET) team.
How MS Analytics Transformed Diego’s Career
The MS Analytics program allowed Diego to expand his skills by combining his domain expertise in petroleum engineering with acquired knowledge in statistics, data engineering, machine learning and predictive modeling, creating a very powerful combination immediately translatable into solving business problems, and allowing Diego to participate and play a meaningful role in the company’s digital transformation.
An Advanced Skillset
Diego is today the product owner of IPSO, a digital oil field platform for production surveillance and optimization which combines data-driven and physics-based model to monitor the health of the company’s onshore producing wells, understand performance, detect problems and optimize production. This platform is used across multiple assets in the organization, includes more than a thousand wells, and it has realized significant tangible and intangible gains for the company.
Analytics at Work:
Abiodun Akogun ’17
A Senior Data Scientist for the Enterprise Data Management and Analytics team at Christus Health where he currently works with business leaders on key Data Science initiatives across the enterprise.
The Value of a Work-Based Capstone Project:
Prior to joining Christus Health, he was a senior consultant/data scientist at Verizon where he developed a space time model that accurately predicts utilization on telecom cell towers to within 5% accuracy. This Model was developed as part of his Capstone Project at the Texas A&M MS. Analytics program.
Selfless Service:
Abiodun is the head of Katy Data Analytics & Machine Learning (a meetup group with focus on use cases for machine learning and artificial intelligence) and one of the co-organizers of North Texas AI &Machine Learning. He likes using his analytical skills to teach math in his spare time and he also uses his spare time to give seminars on Big Data and Analytics.
Passion for Analytics:
Some of Abiodun’s projects involve building classification models, sentiment analysis on customer textual data to help identify patterns in customer data and building time series models to help forecast future trends in organizational data.
Like Minded Peers
Abiodun holds a Master’s degree in Analytics from Texas A&M University, a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Tennessee Technological University and a Bachelor’s degree
(First Class Honors) in Electrical Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria.
How the Program Impacted Students
Joel Hill ’16
Laura R. ’18
“Having an engineering background, measuring results was always inherent to my work. In my early career, I didn’t consider Analytics being a separate career option. It wasn’t until later that I realized that although I used numbers and metrics to track progress, there were limits to my knowledge in that area. So, you can say I fell in to Analytics the hard way. I was also looking for ways to make myself more marketable. I saw Analytics as a path to do both – to learn a new set of skills and to be more marketable in today’s environment. I am detail-oriented by nature and Analytics appeals to that side of me. This program has challenged me in more ways that I have thought possible. My advice to someone wondering if this field is for them is to not be intimidated. Applied analytics is more about answering business questions than about statistical theory. Much of this field is centered on the ability to recognize patterns and visualize trends – skills that many women have.”
Donal C. ’19
“I’ve really enjoyed the material taught in this course. I’ve learned a lot and the topics are very insightful. I love the notion of teamwork and certainly appreciate it. There’s a lot I don’t know; and when I connect with my classmates using the technology, we get to talk about the assignments and projects together. We learn from each other. It’s a very rich experience: Having classmates all over the country coming together and working in teams to take on class assignments. I don’t think I could’ve made a better decision.”
Kaylan T. ’19
“I decided to pursue my Master’s in Analytics because as an I.T. Business Analyst, I work with data day in and day out. And I want to try and get insights out of that data to deliver a huge rate of return for my company, and for my career. Also, as a mother of two girls, I want to show them that when they grow up, they can do anything. Even if it means working full-time, going to school and being a mom.”