1.4. TO 618: Applied Business Analytics and Decisions

I took one of the most popular classes in Ross, “Applied Business Analytics and Decisions” in Fall term this year. I feel this class literally deserves one of the most popular courses in Ross.

The class objective is to learn how to make strategic and tactical decision on many various problems by using excel and its supportive software such as Power View, Power Pivot, Power Query, Solver, Analytic Solver and so on. A professor taught how to use the software in the class by using many examples, and students had worked on assignments with one or two students almost every week, and one or two teams made a presentation in class as a data consultant. This was something we cannot take away from reading textbooks.

I learned much stuff from this class, but here I will write three points which interested me the most.

• Data Mining tool is very useful in managing the massive amount of data with many common errors. It also classifies and predicts what we want from the data set by using kNN, Logistic Regression, classification trees, naïve Bayes, and so on.
• Analytic Solver® is also a powerful tool as enabling us to use sensitivity, optimization, and simulation analyses as well as to build statistical distribution models easily. This is more than naïve Excel Solver.
• Power Pivot is an excellent add-in tool as it easily connects all of the data like what you want.

Simply saying, naïve Excel solver and functions seem to be enough to make most of the analyses which we need in professional and daily routine work. We do not need to buy any software described above, but the thing that we can utilize both of them is the most important takeaway from the class.

1.3. ELI 592: Understanding Spoken English

ELI is a kind of English classes, which help non-native English speakers to improve their English ability; hence ELI is neither mandatory nor graded as the business school. It just grades students’ performance with “Satisfactory” or “Unsatisfactory.” I took an English listening class titled “Understanding Spoken English” with one credit.

For most non-native English learners, improving listening ability is the first necessary step to increase the learning in the U.S. as they learn everything in English. They cannot understand what native English professors speak especially when they speak very fast, utter something, and make American jokes.

The class was designed for those who struggle to understand native-English speakers. The main strategy is very simple; listen as much as you can! The problem is that implementing the strategy is very tough. So, the professor told us many listening resources from the beginning levels to daily topics through professional ones. Also, she encouraged students to write down what they listened to and what they felt difficult to understand. These memorandum helps the professor to give some appropriate advice to her students.

My learning after taking this class was very important to me. I learned listening needs less effort and helps me to get any information at a faster pace than reading books or browsing the internet. I preferred reading books to get any information to listening to something before, but now I always go to YouTube to search for meanings of unknown words. 5 years or more before, YouTube was a terrible website as its contents were piracy or useless. Now, good YouTubers and enthusiastic teachers in any field have posted many videos to explain esoteric terminology or whatever, making YouTube one of the valuable resources to learn something new.