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Data to Decisions

By Risk and Insurance Department

November 3, 2021

All MBA students at the Wisconsin School of Business take a Data to Decisions course. As the world becomes more digitally and numerically oriented, the course is increasingly relevant. Recently, Gordon Enderle, Director of the Capstone in Actuarial Science, took charge of the course, and has been instilling in the students a strong foundation of how to analyze data in order to help make business decisions. The course is tough, and often students have an aversion to numbers and statistics. Yet Gordon has gotten through the student barriers and made a difference in their learning, and ultimately, their success.

Teaching Data to Decisions fits within the department’s overall analytics push. Daniel Bauer is the director of the MS in Business Analytics program and is highly involved in all aspects of our graduate efforts in analytics. Richard Crabb is director of our MBA certificate in analytics. And Paul Johnson, Anita Mukherjee, Kirk Peter, Margie Rosenberg, Peng Shi, and Justin Sydnor all teach analytics courses.

Below are a few of the anonymously-offered comments from MBA students:

This is a very difficult course – Professor Enderle was spot on during his introduction on Day 1. The material is essential in the business world. Although there is a lot to absorb, this is a very informative course.

I work in a research lab so there is a lot of “data to ideas” going on. I thought this class would be helpful to me to understand a little more what the researchers are doing, and how and why they use R, among other things. I realize now why it is a slow process and how complicated it can be. After all the stress of it, my schedule mostly, I think I learned a lot and it was a successful course for me. 

Great course covering a valuable topic, however I feel like it should be longer to fully understand and utilize R Studio. With having to take the course entirely online due caring for a newborn and COVID concerns, having even an extra few weeks would have been very beneficial. I do feel confident that I will be able to use the tools I’ve learned in both Excel and R in my workplace and beyond.