I come from a very non-quantitative background. I did international studies for my undergrad major, so there were no classes that required quantitative skills. One of the reasons I wanted to come to the MMS program was to increase my experience with numbers. Here, at Fuqua, you get plenty of numbers!

We start by learning basic accounting practices and statistics skills in our first term, and then learn corporate finance and marketing analytics, and some more accounting along the way. Throughout the whole year, we take 11 quantitative courses that help us learn topics such as evaluating the net present value (NPV) of a new business model, diversifying a portfolio, balancing books, pricing a product/service according to certain marketing plans, etc.

A tool I especially thought was useful was SPSS. This software is used in marketing class to analyze customer preferences and behaviors. In our Fundamentals of Market Intelligence class, we used it to analyze survey data. We learned how to segment groups according to customer preferences, analyze what variables affect certain customer behaviors, how to run basic performance measures, and so forth.

I can’t say that I can do all of these things perfectly, but I can say that I’ve learned how to do all these quantitative analyses and have learned to get a more analytical view on matters. Although I’m not pursuing a career in finance, being more familiar with numbers will help me in marketing and advertising, where customer response and preference analytics are important!