My First Month in Data Analytics Class at LBS EMBA28

My first one month in Data Analytics class at LBS could be summarized as ‘surprising’. But, why surprised? Couple of unexpected events.

Presented under the three paragraphs below is my feelings about first, Data Analytics course which I considered as the most challenging of all the courses and the remaining three courses which would be subject of later write-up.

The greatest of my surprise is the Data Analytics course. Before my first class, I was acting under the impression that I was going to perform excellently well in data analytics class and going through the course outline, I returned to myself with great fear. But, again, I told myself, just attend couple of classes before you analyze your fear to know if they are justified or not. Then here comes our first class with topic ‘introduction to probability’, I told myself, you are a guru in probability back then in school and this is not going to be different from that but after solving few questions on probability in class, I felt like I have never been to probability class before. How did this happened, is it due to passage of time, lack of practice or due to the practical application of probability to business problem approach being adopted in LBS? These questions remained unsolved in my mind but again, it brought with it a moment of realization that I needed to put more effort to Data Analytic if I were to graduate from Lagos business school. Further questions treated and more classes on probability only embolden my fear.

I was forced to wait and analyze the whole situation around data analytics and three questions popped-up, four actually;

1. What part of the course present the greatest challenge to date?
2. How depended are other topics on the challenging topics?
3. What is the knowledge gap between where I want to be and where I am currently with regard to data analytics course?
4. How do I close the gap?

To answer the above questions, I prepared the list of all topics that was treated in Data Analytics classes to date and assigned to each topics a weighing of between 1 to 5, 5 being the worst performance and 1 being a fair performance. And, using that criteria, out of the five topics we’ve treated in Data Analytic, my performance is as outlined in the below table.

Table 1.1

        Topic                                                                          Performance

The result of the analysis above suggest that my worst performance came in forecasting and time series and my about fair performance came in decision analysis. Based on this analysis, my second question was considered, thus, ‘how depended are other topics on the challenging topics’? My response to that question after analyzing the whole course work on data analytic is that these challenging topics look like a prerequisite to understanding the later the topics and this probably explained the reason why these topics was structured to be the first to consider before adding more complexity as the course progresses.

To be continued.