MIT’s Sloan School of Management: Master of Business Analytics

About the Program

MIT Sloan’s first cohort in 2016 for its brand new Master of Business Analytics (MBAn) program is composed of just 16 students. But program director Dimitris Bertsimas is already making a bold prediction for the future of the 12-month program. In just five years, he believes it will receive more applications than Sloan’s full-time MBA program.

In a mere two weeks for the first admissions cycle, the program attracted 250 applicants. That’s 16 applicants for each seat in the debut cohort, better than the 13 applicant-per-seat ratio for Sloan’s MBA. At steady state, Bertsimas expects to enroll 60 students a year in the business analytics program, selecting from among thousands of applicants.

“Our first objective is to really develop the predominant analytics program in the world,” he maintains. “I’m not kidding on this. That is exactly my objective.”

Besides the prestige of the Sloan brand, the program features an unusual and important twist–a third of the curriculum is applied learning where students work on a real world challenge for a real company. Students will spend three and one-half months on the company’s premises. “They start with data and it leads to decisions,” says Bertsimas. “This is philosophically different because it puts the emphasis on where it is in the real world: from data to decisions.”

The offering is tailored for current students who will graduate by fall or recent college graduates who plan to pursue a career in the data science industry, as well as those seeking career advancement or change, especially engineers, mathematicians, physicists, computer programmers, and other high-tech professionals.

The program answers the industry’s demand for a skilled pool of graduates who can apply data science to solve business challenges.

Interested candidates should have strong mathematical, computer science, or statistical backgrounds.

Program Format and Schedule

The rigor of the MIT Sloan Master of Business Analytics program prepares students for careers that apply and manage modern data science to solve critical business challenges. The curriculum consists of five required fundamental subjects, one required summer capstone experience, one required project class, six three-hour modules, one pro-seminar, and a minimum of three focused electives. The culmination of the program is the analytics summer capstone project, which gives students an opportunity to work on real-life data science problems. In September, upon completion of the summer capstone, students will earn their formal degree.