As business and data grow ever more inextricably linked, the University of Virginia has announced a new dual-degree offering from the Darden School of Business and the UVA Data Science Institute. The new MBA/Master of Science in Data Science (MBA/MSDS) will begin with a limited base cohort this summer, with the full program slated for launch in 2018.
“This new dual degree represents an incredibly exciting development for the Darden School and prospective students,” Darden Professor Raj Venkatesan, faculty lead for the dual degree, said in a statement. “There is a clear demand from students for this kind of analytics-driven curriculum and from organizations for employees who can harness the almost limitless power of Big Data to develop new business models. These graduates will be coveted hires and become indispensable leaders.”
Participants in the dual-degree program will first complete the Darden curriculum of core courses—including finance, marketing, decision analytics, strategy, ethics, accounting and leadership—and then get to select from more than 100 elective courses in the final term of the first year. Then they will complete the 11-month MSDS curriculum offered by the Data Science Institute, including core courses such as computer science, statistics and systems and information engineering and a capstone project focused on a real-world data science problem. In total, the program will take two years to complete, and tuition fees will be the sum of the standalone MBA and MSDS programs.
“This new program will change the way that top business leaders of tomorrow are thinking about data,” Data Science Institute Director Don Brown said in a statement. “This game-changing dual degree will give students a deep understanding of data science along with a top-ranked management program that will allow them to unlock new ways of questioning, answering and thinking about today’s top business challenges.”
While many business schools, such as the MIT Sloan School of Management, offer specialized MBAs with a focus on data analytics, the new UVA dual-degree option provides students with an even higher level of big data expertise. The program is the latest addition to an array of dual-degree options available to students at Darden. Others include opportunities to pursue the MBA along with a concurrent degree in law, education, engineering, nursing, public policy, public health, and East Asian studies.
Head over to the official Darden School of Business website for more information on the program.
