The reason that brings me to study master at George Mason University is because it serves as the best engineering school in Virginia. Also, Mason has a master program, which is data analytics, that most companies looking for nowadays. Data analytics is defined as the qualitative and quantitative techniques that used to optimize the productivity and business profit based on the business requirements. According to the data analytics master program in mason, I consider that there are six concentrations which I am interested in such as business analytics, cyber analytics, data mining, financial engineering, the internet of things, and predictive analysis. The other thing that makes me excited to the program is the courses they offered such as machine learning, fraud examination, and decision and risk analysis. According to my researches about the employee skills that most companies are looking for nowadays, those three courses are included into the things of what most companies looking for nowadays and also, those three courses are still strongly related to my bachelor degrees knowledge which is computer science.
Since I am taking two semester pathways program, and also because I only permitted to take two major courses at the first two semesters, I probably will take the additional courses at the break after the second and the third semester. Also, since I plan to graduate on time in two years, it does not rule out the possibility for me to take the summer semester forward. According to that, my course plan will be such as the following:
My course plan above comprises all the courses which also contain the prerequisite courses that I will take sequentially to the end of semester. Each arrow shows the relation between the course that should be taken prior to the next course in the next semester. In other words, the arrow shows the correlation of each courses to the prerequisite courses. My course plan also indicates the two additional short semesters that I will take during the semester break in order to graduate in two years.
I choose all the courses above since I am sure that all such courses are useful for me in the future. Besides that, I perceive that all the courses above are related to my bachelor degree major which is computer science. All the courses above are also related to my work experiences in financial institution. For instance, I plan to take courses which relate to machine learning and database since I had learned the fundamental of those two courses in my bachelor degree, and I believe that such two major courses will prepare me better to take other courses that relate to the different concentration fields such as business analytics. I choose one of the business analytics concentration courses, which is data mining for business analytics, because I think such course will be useful for me one day when I serve as one of the top management levels in my career. I believe such course will support me while I will make the critical decision such as opening the new office branch, or creating new products in order to maximize the business gain. Moreover, since I already had worked for seven years in a bank as an assistant manager in electronic channel banking system department, I saw that opening branch offices and the Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) require further analysis through the axioms that probably I will learn in data mining for business analytics course. Therefore, besides taking the concentration in data mining which relates to my bachelor degree major, I also plan to take other concentration as well in order to support my knowledge in making decision that requires me to do the further analytics.