Graduate studies can be a tricky business. In the day and age where many effective lessons and courses are available for free on the Internet, it becomes difficult to choose the right subjects to invest your limited time and money in. More often than not, it just comes down to the professor. In the Spring 2019 semester, I had the pleasure of studying in the class of one of the finest teachers I have seen in a long time. Everyone was already gaga over his abilities, but I only knew how amazing Prof. B.P. Murthi was once I started attending his lectures.
Your first impression of Prof. Murthi is that he is a simple, soft-spoken man who delivers his lectures with great confidence. Having taught at UTD for 25 long years, his profile boasts of several accolades and awards. But to really understand why Prof. Murthi is so wonderful, you have to attend at least a couple of his lectures. He is one of those teachers who make your life difficult and challenging, but you’ll be grateful at the end of it when you realize it is all for the right reasons. He gives you interesting insights about predictive analytics and its applications in the marketing world using the SAS programming language. His conversational style and sense of humor keeps you interested and engaged. He spends a considerable amount of time teaching how to interpret results that you get after running the code. He emphasizes that we are managers and we need to be able to draw insights and interpret the results effectively to help with important marketing decisions. Just knowing and running the code is not enough!
All other good things aside, what really makes Predictive Analytics with SAS under Prof. Murthi one of the best classes to take at UTD is the homework he gives you! His assignments that focus on real world problems and his project, which is perhaps the most meticulous data science work you will do in your graduate studies. It is also what will make you stay up at night scratching your head, calling your friends for help, looking up solutions online, and still come up shorthanded. From linear and logistic regression procedures to factor, cluster and discriminant analysis, and from heteroskedasticity, endogeneity to time series and panel data – Prof. Murthi strives to ensure that you understand all the important concepts of econometrics in the analytics context.
Thanks to Prof. Murthi, I also had the opportunity to work with a brilliant group of Business Analytics students – all of whom came from varied backgrounds and were extremely talented in their own respective fields. I am thankful for having Sajal, Varda, Aman, Aditi and Nitasha as my group members. They held my hand throughout this semester and, along with Prof. Murthi, helped me understand how econometrics and predictive analytics work in the real world. Hours and hours were spent on our project that answered three important predictive analytics questions using SAS on a retail data set –
What is the quantifiable effect of advertising on a specific brand of spaghetti sauce?
How can we describe typical customer behavior?
When are customers most likely to churn?
We applied RFM, Survival analysis and logistic regression on a complicated and large data set with millions of rows to answer these questions. We also gave recommendations based on the insights we got from the data. This kind of hands-on approach on a real-world data set is precisely what is needed for graduate students majoring in data science or analytics.
There are many professors who use Powerpoint presentations to teach and most of the times, the slides are enough to help you prepare for the exams. But not with Prof. Murthi! You need to attentively sit through each one of his lectures, take notes, make videos, do whatever you can to capture everything he says if you really want to make the most of his class. It is all worth it as, by the end of it, you feel you have learnt something valuable and are on the right path to learn more.
When I shook Prof. Murthi’s hand on the last day of class, I genuinely felt a sense of gratitude. I also felt sad that the class was over. In fact, I may audit some of his classes in the future… just for some perspective!