Thank you so much
Thanks a lot to Shreya and Gyan Dhan !
If we upload our SOP to online platforms aren’t there chances of our profile being reused , will this not lead to plagiarism ?
Congrats on the admit. They both are good universities. The difference would be, in Northwestern will be longer duration, its 15 months so in UT Austin its 10 months so that’s the major difference. Getting a Masters in Northwestern also might have an internship. So you should look at the time factor, if you need some immediate time to study, if you think 1 year won’t be sufficient to you. Northwestern is a good choice. Second difference is in UT Business analytics program is held in their business school while Northwestern program is held in their engineering school. So the difference is that business schools have more recruiting events while engineering schools are focused more on learning, you’ve to do recruiting on your own. Nobody will help you; you have to be more proactive if getting a job is a priority. The cost in UT might be less than in Northwestern, because of the timeline, one is 10 months and other is 15 months. Obviously cost is considered but you should also consider whether you want a 1 year course or you want an internship or you need help in recruitment where you will have events in business school just for getting a job. Considering those would be helpful.
@Gagan
For my university the average GPA was 3.5 for my program. It varies a lot; someone might not have a good GPA but might have good work experience. GPA is important but there are a lot of things. Some threshold in general needs 3.0 but if you don’t have good GPA but you have other things in your profile then having slightly lower GPA might be ok if you are above the threshold.GPA in US is very different; anyone can get 3, so 3 is considered low here. The conversion scale it’s not straightforward so C here is very rare thing while C in India is we can get it. Conversion is the key, if your university is telling you to convert, most of the time I’m sure Indians will have GPA greater than 3. GRE would be number 1 because GPA is a score and we have GRE which is 220 that would compensate GPA and writing good SOP and good recommendations would be helpful as well. So, number 1 would be to compensate with good GRE that would be very-very good.
Industrial engineering I don’t have a lot of idea but I think it’s called operational and industrial engineering, if I am not wrong. One would think there is a lot of demand, a, lot of people from the industrial engineering get big jobs! I have a friend who did his masters from UT Austin from Industrial and operational engineering and ended up getting a very good job in management consulting.
I think it is a two years program so getting a TA ship won’t be that difficult. Most of the time as per I know TA ship depends on the finding of your department. I haven’t heard of cases where people really wanting for TA ship but they didn’t get it, so that should be okay! For SOP I would say, just don’t stick to getting facts and making it like resume rather making it more like a story type and then highlighting that why would the program or why would the university make a perfect match for you, that’s more important and then again getting a lot of feedback on your SOP that’s the most important!
That looks like an excellent profile, all the scores are really good and GPA is good, TOEFL is good, everything is good, now the only thing would be to write a good SOP for UT Austin!
UT Austin although ask two academic and one professional LOR, they are okay with two professional and one academic if you have more than 2 years of experience. But you said that you have 2 plus years of working experience, so, I guess that you enroll you with two professional and one academic LOR.
So, I guess for me my friends were my GMAT scores or you can say that GRE scores, my GPA was okay but wasn’t great, but I guess I compensated that with a good score in TOEFL and GMAT and my work experience definitely played an important role. I think the way I wrote SOPs somehow helped me in making my profile stronger, so, for me the main strengths were my GMAT scores and my SOPs. You could have a good working experience but if you don’t put it up in the right way they will never know that, right? My GMAT score was 740 which are good for the masters program.
Again, I think for me one of the most important reasons was UT Austin. MS is done by their business school, so, again the business school brings a lot of other advantages, like a lot of recruitment is done! The university helps in recruitment, so, that was one reason, second reason I think, I found the ranking of the institution to be good and then I talked to seniors who were studying at UT and other universities and I just found out that! All though the program is hectic but the support that your professor or your career team puts in during the 10 months is really good, I am sure that it’s good at other universities also but somehow I ended up joining UT Austin. This is just a very small advantage over other universities like Georgia Tech. and University of Minnesota. Austin is growing a lot in technology companies, a lot of technical and technological companies like Samsung and others are opening their offices in Austin, and there are a lot of startups, so, I guess that way you have easy access to networking and talking to these companies.
That would definitely help especially if you are new to all this, especially python or statistics. You have to do the basic courses because you will be taught everything, but if you know something you will be more comfortable with learning during your courses, so, I would say take any course from coursera, datacamp, and do the basics of python or basics of R or basics of statistics and be like good enough.
As far as I know, for business analytics, you don’t really have any college club, you don’t have time, but what we have is courses in Market Analytics then we also work closely with masters in marketing people, we work with them in case studies, exams like competitions and as a market analyst in that competition, we don’t have dedicated college clubs for that.
I guess, I have already shared my opinion on that, but I guess if somebody has joined late then, you know. I say one word again and again, one should get a lot of feedback on his/her SOP because that helped me big time because I can’t tell how different my last SOP was!
I know someone doing MS or PhD in Industrial and Operations Engineering at UTA, but I am not 100% sure about the cutoff!
Definitely, the duration pays a big role. I guess there are both pros and cons in having a shorter course. Of course, you have a challenge to find the job in ten months but the good thing was the career counselors at UTA started pushing me to find the jobs from day 1 itself. So, it’s like you start doing it from the first semester itself or maybe from the first month itself, so I guess the good thing is from the all these programs, your university pushes you a lot so that kind of gives you more time to find a job. For a program like CMU where you have to perform internship, the program is still for one year and that extra 4-5 months is for internship, so it’s pretty much the same but what you do is you are just spending your time to find an internship instead of a job and then you try to get PPO from the internship and you apply for a new job again in case you don’t want to join the company where you interned.
So I guess CMU and < > I guess you don’t want to do the internship before the job because the program is again one year- one year. So, if you think you are not ready for a job or you don’t have any work experience, you want to see or maybe it’s your first job and you want to start an internship for that, then CMU and USC might be good options. But if you already have work experience or you are already comfortable, then directly searching for jobs should give a short for full time. UTA is good as well!
The batch size is of 62 people.
I think every campus has a lot of career fairs and different career activities and sometimes you don’t even know about it! A lot of events I went to I found out about by my friends two hours before. So, I guess being active and knowing what career activities are going around in the campus helps you along, even if you are in the engineering department or in the business department, there would be a lot of events where they would call your college seniors and you will have the opportunity to talk to your seniors and use that as a networking opportunity, use that event to make connections with those people and later on message them on LinkedIn and if they are interested they would get back to you.
It is a good thing if you are able to put yourself out there and tell them I will be a good fit out there for this company and if they message you later, they will definitely get back to you, just being part of those events helps you in the beginning and then apart from that, you know if you have time you can be active on LinkedIn, find relevant people, find relevant companies, find relevant people in those companies and just message them and then using your undergrads, I am sure you would be having a lot of undergrads seniors or batch mates who are already here working, because asking for their reference in these companies, these things help!
So my answer would be similar, you could focus on your SOPs and LORs, make them better as much as possible, and then obviously you will have a chance to get admission. But you have to be coming with good SOPs and LORs.
In terms of good US colleges in analytics I would say, I think right now a lot of universities have started their business analytics programs, most of such programs are in good universities. If we pick out the Rank being on QS or any other ranking website like data camp and make a list of universities, keep some universities in the list of ambitious universities, some universities in the list of backup universities and apply this to everything not just one or two, so that would increase the chance of getting into a good university.
So, master in CS or AI or Mechanical, they are more technical and you have to do a thesis in most of these masters, while most of these degrees MS in BA, MS in Data Science you don’t have to do thesis, more about doing projects, like course projects and then more about like found a job, so, I don’t think like doing a job in non-traditional course is difficult, because that is definitely one of your priorities in these degrees. There are certain differences between non-traditional degrees like MS in BA is slightly different than MS in AI or MS in Data Science. MS in BA would focus more on business courses also. We will be using analytics for finance, analytics for marketing while learning would be more technical, you would be doing technical AI or Machine Learning courses. I guess in terms of jobs you could go in any direction in terms of non-traditional courses.
It’s definitely not necessary; you can come fresh out of your undergrad and join with Masters Degree. The only thing is that sometimes, some work experience helps you in getting the interviews. Again, one can crack the interviews without work experience but you have to be more active, you have to network more, basically tell people that you have done internships, you have done projects and you did very well there and that is why I will be a good folk for this company, so just be more active if you don’t have any work experience and taking feedback and help from your batch mates who actually have work experience and that also helps. If a person has already got a job in the batch and he/she will help others to get a job in that company! So, I guess if you don’t have work experience, doing well in the projects like taking the projects very seriously would become helpful.
Supply chain Analytics and Marketing Analytics are both electives at UTA, and I chose Marketing Analytics. We had professor Sonia, he was my favorite professor but I don’t have any idea on supply chain analytics.
I guess, I did not face a lot of problems in India when I had to move from chemical engineering to Flipkart because I was on a mood early that is common in India, like non-traditional companies come to your campus and you join them, so, I guess, that weren’t challenging. In the US, if you are joining a technical field, having an engineering degree helps you, so, I don’t think it was a problem for me. And then, when I moved to analytics, I think you know getting good experience and was doing my program and doing well in my analytics projects, that helped me so, I guess, nobody cared about my undergrad degree i.e. chemical engineering.
I think other than UTA, University of Minnesota, Georgiatech, and UC-Davis are some of the other universities.
Can you please share his/her contact details with me since I would like to finalize whether to apply for that program or not ?
I thank you.
Best Regards,
Thilina