Student Perspective: Amy Tsang, MSBA ’20

One of the most remarkable things about the Notre Dame MSBA program is the personal connections that we developed with professors. Having earned my undergraduate degree in Accounting from a larger, state university in California, I rarely had the opportunity to speak with faculty, let alone develop relationships. The program emphasizes a collaborative learning environment that fosters deeper conversation and interactions inside and outside the classroom.

The Notre Dame MSBA faculty come from diverse business backgrounds with a wealth of industry knowledge and a boundless professional network from around the world. They include a former cyber security scientist at National Security Agency, the director of analytics at Google and a founder of a healthcare analytics consulting firm. These professors — though still active in the business world, professional society, and with research commitments — never leave any student’s question unanswered.

That personal connection only deepened over the course of the program. During our last immersion experience in South Bend, one of our faculty members hosted our entire class in his home for dinner. It was one of many examples of how Notre Dame places the faculty and students on equal footing.

One of my favorite courses was Data Visualization. I remember the first day of the course, our professor displayed data of our classmates on a Tableau world map where it showed what city we were from and where we would like to work after the MSBA program. After crunching numbers in Excel and Access for almost ten years, this course really opened my eyes to how we can organize data in a different way and help our audience grasp the bigger picture with ease.

As a consultant at Huron Consulting Group, I often work with enterprise wide financial data from clients. We all understand data analytics can provide insight and drive decisions, but every client has different objectives and unique data structure – the MSBA faculty helped me broaden my understanding of how to approach and tackle analytical problems for different clients as well as discover new emerging topics and issues in the data analytics world such as Blockchain and ethical concerns of data usage and protection.

I have already begun to apply some of the technical skills at my work and developed a pilot Tableau dashboard for my clients to visualize their financial data. With the unlimited possibilities of the future of data analytics, I am excited to bring what I have learned from the program and faculty to my professional career and continue to advance my knowledge after the program.