Virtual Open House MS in Data Analytics Engineering Transcript

George Mason Online Admissions: I’m Tabitha, and I am one of the enrollment coordinators on behalf of George Mason, and so excited to be here co-hosting with these fantastic guests here that are going to share more about the program. I’m going to go ahead and go over the agenda tonight. If that’s okay with everybody.

George Mason Online Admissions: just a quick overview of the evening, we’re going to meet our presenters who will share very valuable information about the online program. You’ll get a better understanding about the program. Why you should choose George Mason

George Mason Online Admissions: curriculum details. We’re also going to learn about industry trends. I’m super excited about that, too. And what does the online classroom look like? We get a lot of questions about that. So I love to hear this part and love that they get to share that with you, too. We’re also going to learn about the missions requirements

George Mason Online Admissions: and end with questions and answers. So we highly encourage you to participate. Ask those questions and appreciate you being here tonight. Please feel free. You can. Actually, we’ll go over the next next slide here. How to participate. Honestly, I feel like a lot of times. It’s easiest just to put it in the chat. They’re easy to see. Sometimes the raise your hand feature will work for these, sometimes they won’t, so if it’s not working for

George Mason Online Admissions: you feel free to put it in the chat. And we’re just excited that you’re here tonight and excited to share more information with you about the data analytics program.

George Mason Online Admissions: And without further ado, I’d like to introduce you to our presenters, Dr. Jim Balda

George Mason Online Admissions: and Bernard Smith and Mary. Thank you all so much for joining us tonight, and I’m going to go ahead and hand it over to Dr. Baldo, and y’all can introduce yourselves if you don’t mind.

Jim Baldo: Okay, thank you very much, Tabitha and and I, before I introduce myself, I just like to to thank our our Rise Point colleague Tabitha being here today. She’s a great person to work with, also my colleague

Jim Baldo: and soldiers and colleagues and soldiers in the trenches here as well. Professor Schmidt and Mary Baldwin. But we have a really really great team here, the online team. It is a lot of effort. We do our best to keep to keep all of our online students on track

Jim Baldo: and and maintaining, you know, obtaining the goals and objectives that they set out for their careers, and where they want to go. So just a little bit about myself. I’m Jim Baldo. I’m the director of the data analytics engineering program. I became the director in the fall of 2018 I came from industry. I was an adjunct professor at George Mason University for 19 years

Jim Baldo: prior to becoming a the director, going full time in academia. And and I was the person who was handed the the task of starting the online program.

Jim Baldo: And we’re very, very fortunate to to partner with Rise Point. Initially it was Wiley, and then they were they they were acquired. That part of Wiley was acquired by by rise point and so they provided us with

Jim Baldo: mentors to get our online programs. Our courses moved from the classroom to online. And that was, I want to admit that was a really challenging job for all of us that participated in going in and making the courses asynchronous.

Jim Baldo: We’ll talk a little bit about that that later. And I, I teach one of the foundation courses that we’ll talk about. Cs 504, which is our data management and data mining course.

Jim Baldo: And so I have a chance to interact with students on within the online program. And and we have a

Jim Baldo: I have to say every course that I’ve taught the Cs 504 as well as our capstone course. It has always just been a real pleasure to work with our online students. Many of them are working full time. Which is why they like the online program. And I get a chance to meet with them get a sense for what they’re doing.

Jim Baldo: And

Jim Baldo: I always learn from students. So that is really the the real benefit for me, for teaching is is 2 twofold, is meeting all these wonderful people and learning from them the students. And then, secondly, each time I teach a course that I think I know the material. I learned something that I

Jim Baldo: you know that I thought I knew, but I really didn’t know that. Well, so it’s it’s a continuous learning activity for me as well as learning from from the students and getting a chance to know them. So just a few more things about myself.

Jim Baldo: I still consult in industry today. But I spent about 42, 43 plus years before I became full-time faculty member in industry, primarily worked in the Northern Greater Washington, DC. Area. I’ve worked primarily in government

Jim Baldo: defense Dod and the Intelligence community,

Jim Baldo: and and some some industry

Jim Baldo: and things have changed over the time that I started. It just absolutely amazes me how things have really changed in terms of of the technologies, but as well as the foundational knowledge and information in data, analytics, engineering. So with that, I’m going to hand over the baton to

Jim Baldo: To Professor Bernie Bernie Schmidt and let him introduce himself, and then we’ll move on to to to Mary Baldwin. So.

Bernard Schmidt: Thank you. Jim. So Hi, everyone, I’m Bernie Schmidt. I’m the assistant director of the data Analytics engineering program.

Bernard Schmidt: I’m also the Dan 690 capstone coordinator. So I manage that entire capstone course, every semester for all the sections that we have for that course. Like Dr. Baldo. I’ve come from industry. This is, I’m coming up on my 50th year working with computer systems. I’ve been an academic for 14. And I’m actually a graduate of this program.

Bernard Schmidt: I started in this program when it was a certificate in 2014, and I eventually graduated with a degree in 2017. And I’ve been the assistant director since the fall of 2020.

Bernard Schmidt: So that’s pretty much my expertise. I’ve you know, worked on everything from mainframes to telecommunications. My

Bernard Schmidt: current background. I focus on deployments with cloud foundational type projects.

Bernard Schmidt: building building system building capstone projects based around the services that can be supported through the cloud programs from Microsoft Azure Aws and Google Cloud platform. So that’s kind of my, you know, just like Dr. Baldo’s area of expertise intelligence community and and things that I don’t do. That’s my area of expertise within the program. So and I’ll turn it over to our absolutely wonderful head advisor, Mary Baldwin.

Mary Baldwin: Thank you. So I am Mary Baldwin, sloop. I’m the graduate academic advisor for the data analytics program. I work with our on campus students, our online students.

Mary Baldwin: pretty much everybody. I’ve worked at Mason for almost a decade. And I’ve worked at a couple different universities. I really love working in this field and with students in this field because it’s so diverse. And there’s so many people with so many different specializations, especially in the online program. You kind of come in with your own, your background, your knowledge or expertise. And so I learn from students sort of like, Dr. Baldo said, and I am here mostly

Mary Baldwin: to support you, to make sure that you are able to go from the moment you join the program to graduation smoothly, I give you information about courses. I can help you plan things out. I can give you information about policies or resources. If you want to get involved in research, I can support you on that. And so essentially, it can be easy in an online program to feel kind of disconnected. And I never want you to feel that way. I’m kind of your support person

Mary Baldwin: in coordination with your success. Coaches as part of your team to kind of keep you involved, you know, keep you supported throughout your whole time in the program and my background. My graduate degree is in linguistics. So if you ever want to chat about natural language processing or computational linguistics, or Chat Gpt, I will talk your ear off, so that’s pretty much it for me.

George Mason Online Admissions: Love that. Thank you all so much. I’m just so excited to have you all here tonight and with that I’ll go ahead and move over to the next slide.

George Mason Online Admissions: And I I wasn’t sure who wants to take this area here? But yeah.

Jim Baldo: I can. I can take a stab at it, but certainly gonna let

Jim Baldo: Professor Schmidt and and Mary talk to this as well. But one thing that I I do want to to point out is and and since,

Jim Baldo: with the exception of one of you is in St. Louis, and most of you here are in the Northern Virginia area. George Madison is

Jim Baldo: The largest public university in the State of Virginia.

Jim Baldo: and it has grown. It’s still considered a young university, I mean, it’s not 200 years old, or anything like that, and still considered a young university.

Jim Baldo: It has really acquired a lot of prestige in the last couple of decades. And what brings that prestige is? Certainly it’s done a lot of excellent. It has a lot of excellence, colleges and schools in it, some world class researchers in it, and that’s certainly important. But the thing that we don’t you want to always consider? Are the students your alumni?

Jim Baldo: And we have some really, really excellent alumni, and both Professor Schmidt, Mary and I, you know, when you graduate. That’s not the end of our relationship. We really want to keep you here with us for the rest of your career, because most of the folks, most of our students, in fact, I would say, all of our students, all of our graduates, all of our da and alumni, are lifelong learners.

Jim Baldo: and and I’m sure that if most of you are probably think back just 6, maybe a month ago even. But but 6 months ago there’s new technologies that have come on the the landscape that you’re using in in your workplace, or something that you’re studying. And it’s just absolutely amazing how fast these technologies are being adopted.

Jim Baldo: It used to be that we had, you know, like, maybe 10 to 15% of the engineering community were early adopters, the high risk takers. Okay, we’re going to use some new technology. And and so these people were considered, you know, out on the fringe operating on the fringe today, I think we’re all out on the fringe consuming new technologies. Professor Schmidt mentioned some work that he’s been doing in AI.

Jim Baldo: Specifically, he’s done quite a bit of work like with Llms on the with the capstones. And this has just been, you know it changes, and and things are moving rather quickly, and Mary can also attest to the fact that she gets all sorts of queries about, you know. Hey? Can I take this particular class and and the classes that Mary is constantly trying to keep up to date on

Jim Baldo: their syllabuses are changing to keep up with the technologies the skills that are needed to take some of those courses. So it keeps Mary. Not only does she have a lot of students, you know. The good news is, she has a lot of students. So she gets all this exposure, and she builds this incredible data set in her head. And then, at the same time, it’s a challenge to keep up with with everything that that’s going that’s going on.

Jim Baldo: So what our program provides.

Jim Baldo: And and Professor Schmidt mentioned that that he started in 2414

Jim Baldo: with the certificate program. The program was 10 years old last fall.

Jim Baldo: And if just a little bit about programs in universities is that normally, you create a program to take care of a particular need.

Jim Baldo: And then, after that need is fulfilled over a period of time, then the programs usually wane and drop down in in size and eventually become absorbed, maybe into a department or something like that. We are multidisciplinary. We’re not a department, but we’re a multidisciplinary program and I can’t keep track of all the courses that we have. Now, you’d have to talk to Mary about that. It’s just probably close to a hundred, or even maybe over a hundred.

Mary Baldwin: Definitely over a hundred.

Jim Baldo: Yeah, and they we keep adding them on actually, Mary was instrumental when she she’s a linguist by by education, and she actually brought a concentration into our program and computational linguistics. Which? You know, it’s it’s a very. It’s a very specialized analytics program. But but we wanted to get it in here to make that offering to our our students and offer those courses.

Jim Baldo: and we’ll say a little bit about the offering of the courses from the online versus the the on campus. There. There are some constraints with respect to that.

Jim Baldo: but we we do our best to package things.

Jim Baldo: The program was considered unique when it was started in 2014

Jim Baldo: And the the principle of it was it was to be a 1 of its, a 1 of its kind in the fact that

Jim Baldo: there’s a lot of great, excellent programs in the country. You might see business analytics. So a lot of business schools will have business analytics. They do a great job. You’ll see them in Healthcare

Jim Baldo: College of Medicine, or or in College of science that has specific analytics programs. And even in our engineering school. And we don’t compete with these, there’s a lot of analytics in the various engineering fields like civil.

Jim Baldo: Ops, research systems, engineering,

Jim Baldo: biomedical engineering. And so the the thing that we try to do here is that we focus in on general foundational principles of data, analytics, engineering, and

Jim Baldo: I did a survey about 4 or 5 years ago, where I went off and looked at the syllabus. I tried to find in engineering programs analytics programs that I thought might

Jim Baldo: be similar to ours.

Jim Baldo: And so I would look at their course catalogs. And we still have because of this broad, because we cut across in the college of engineering and computing, we have 2 schools, engineering and computing. And then our program spans out to the college of business, the business school, the business college, and we go over to our health and policy school

Jim Baldo: and we have. We have. We’ve interacted with departments like linguistics. And we have

Jim Baldo: a number of different

Jim Baldo: relationships across George Mason University that we use in our capstone program. So we’re about as diverse as you can be. And that’s a really, really good thing when you’re producing data analytics, engineers that are going to be generalists. You want to be able to give them the tools and the skill sets

Jim Baldo: that they can work with subject matter. Experts. They can help get jobs done. They work in teams, and so we give them the core sets of skills.

Jim Baldo: so that that’s the way we sort of the format, and that’s how the the it was. It was designed. We do get

Jim Baldo: some recognition of, you know. With respect to ranks being rated and whatnot 1 1 recent one that came up the last couple of months was also in terms of cost. We were rated as one of the best values in terms of

Jim Baldo: of online programs in terms of cost.

Jim Baldo: and and I know that that’s important. And then, lastly, I’ll say just one thing here. 2 other things is that we do as Professor Schmidt noted. We do have a certificate program that you can obtain by taking the 4 foundation courses. And if and some people take that track because they’re not sure they, they may already have a Master’s degree. And so they but they just want to take some courses to build up their foundation in analytics so they can take the certificate course.

Jim Baldo: They can get a certificate.

Jim Baldo: and that certificate is, you know, data analytics, engineering, George Mason University. You have that certificate. But you can also continue on and decide. Hey? I think I’m going to go get the master’s those 4 courses that you’ve taken. You could take additional, you know. You can move on. Take the 6 courses.

Jim Baldo: One last thing, and this is a recent thing that has just occurred. We have moved the program. We were on the Fairfax campus. We have moved the program down to Mason Square, which is in our Arlington location or Arlington campus. And there’s a brand new building down there called the fuse. So

Jim Baldo: That is where my office is right now. Professor Schmidt is is on the Fairfax campus. We have him there because we still have students that come by, and the Fairfax Campus. But Professor Schmidt also comes down to the fuse building as well. But if you have a chance, if you if you do, regardless of what you. Do you want to stop by the fuse building? Look me up. I’m on the 7th floor.

Jim Baldo: My office number is 7, 3, 2, 4, and so feel free to drop in shoot me an email or something like that. Make sure that I’m gonna be there, and you know I’d love to talk with you. If you have any particular questions or anything like that.

Jim Baldo: So I should let both Mary and and Professor Schmidt, if you want to add on some more things about the program, because I know you have a lot to.

Jim Baldo: I didn’t cover everything there.

Bernard Schmidt: The. The only thing I want to throw on having

Bernard Schmidt: been a graduate of this program

Bernard Schmidt: is the, you know, a lot of one of the questions I get a lot is, what is the difference between data, analytics, engineering and the data science curriculum.

Bernard Schmidt: And it’s it’s very much like the difference between an it curriculum and a computer science, one focuses on applied, one focuses on theoretical. And so most data science programs focus on the theory

Bernard Schmidt: and being in engineering us being in an engineering school, we’re very much focused on the applied. For example, your last course in your program is the capstone course, you. And, by the way, I will say right up front

Bernard Schmidt: for the online program. Your 1st 9 courses are all asynchronous online, your last course, the capstone is synchronous online meaning. So it’s a change in modality there. But you work with a team of 5 or 6 students, and you apply yourselves over the course of the 15 week semester

Bernard Schmidt: to doing a real world data analytics, engineering problem.

Bernard Schmidt: And we work with capstone partners that you know these. These are not your typical kaggle competition. Clean, nicely, clean data sets that everybody works on. These are very dirty, very messy, complex problems that you work on. And

Bernard Schmidt: and they can be challenging at times. Dr. Baldo can certainly tell. He talks about my working with Chatbots and large language models, which is true. I I’ve approached that from the cloud services perspective. Dr. Baldo, on the other hand, does the same thing, but he works with, for example, one of our capstone partners is Erasmus AI. Which produced climate. Gpt.

Bernard Schmidt: and so he’s done a lot of work in that area as well.

Bernard Schmidt: So so that’s that’s the one thing I would want to point out is that this is very much an applied

Bernard Schmidt: experience program based program as opposed to just purely theoretical. So.

Bernard Schmidt: Mary, turn them over to you.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah. I’ll just say this because I don’t wanna get a. I know we have a limited time, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself. We’re very diverse. We offer more options in a lot of different subfields and a lot of programs you’re gonna find on analytics. We’re very applied. So more hands on, we’re working with messy data. But you can get aspects of that data. Science. Ai engineering that kind of stuff in your coursework as well.

Mary Baldwin: and the modalities in the online program in particular, tend to work well for working students. I will touch on the certificate, and then also the capstone just in terms of like

Mary Baldwin: the nitty, gritty planning stuff when we get to the slides on curriculum a little bit later. But yeah, I would say, having the certificate option, the diversity of options, the modality. It’s just kind of a unique program. So I think we’re cool. But that’s just me. But that’s all.

George Mason Online Admissions: Thank you so much. I’ll go ahead and move to the next slide.

Mary Baldwin: I think, Dr. Balduc, you have already touched a little bit.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah of the program.

Jim Baldo: So, yeah.

Mary Baldwin: To add, here.

Jim Baldo: So let me. There’s there’s a couple of things I think the 3 of us can can talk about a little bit

Jim Baldo: on. So again, just to to recap why it was created. We wanted to to address the

Jim Baldo: the general data analytics. Engineer.

Jim Baldo: one of the things are. So this to answer this question here, are there any industry trends that you could share

Jim Baldo: the changes that I am seeing today? So

Jim Baldo: and Professor Schmidt. His focus is an interest. So we do have some common ones. But then we also have some different ones as well where we focus and do work, and I spend a lot of time with the data. And as Professor Schmidt had mentioned, we have to deal with lots and lots of data, and in some cases, you know.

Jim Baldo: a particular data set

Jim Baldo: for a particular type of analytic may be just fine. But that same data set for another type of analytic. I think Professor Schmidt used the term dirty data. It has to be cleaned up, or it has to be processed.

Jim Baldo: And so one of the things that

Jim Baldo: has been very, very unique, very, very helpful is that in applying various types of AI methods to data

Jim Baldo: which it’s not a black box, it’s not that we just hey, we have this magic Llm, then we can say, we take the data we point. We tell the Llm. Please take a look at this data set. Tell us what you know what we should do for this particular analytic. It does not quite work like that, but we are seeing a lot of work that we’re doing with various types of foundation models today.

Jim Baldo: To help us with processing, you know, setting up a data pipeline

Jim Baldo: and processing data. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that on a on a slide that we’re going to come up with.

Jim Baldo: So this question here on the bottom. Is there the need for this program in today’s society? I still practice in industry, and I’m all of the work that I’ve done prior to coming on as director, and prior to all my consulting, since I’ve been the director has been team based, and

Jim Baldo: everything we do is team based. So we work in it with teams. I usually work with subject matter experts and I have to listen very, very closely to what they need. And then I work with other colleagues who have specialized types of skills.

Jim Baldo: and we come together to try to prototype things to come up with solutions. So if anything, I’ve seen the need for the skill sets that we provide here to continue to grow.

Jim Baldo: and so I believe that the degree itself, with the way we prepare you is, you know, you certainly will come out with enhanced skill, sets over the the 10 courses that Mary had mentioned, that you take

Jim Baldo: and

Jim Baldo: but it just, you know, and and you’ll have these, you’ll and then you’ll learn other skills. Because, you know, there’s new. Not only is there technology changes, Professor Schmidt said. But there’s also foundational knowledge that you’re going to eventually have to sort of pick up as you go as you go forward.

Jim Baldo: But the ideal situation here is that these forces that we have to deal with the program adjusts itself

Jim Baldo: with respect to the various type of forces that are needed out in industry today, and as many of you know, I mean, things are just extremely diverse out there, and you have to be able to. You’re thrown into a situation where you’ve got a problem you’ve got to solve. You’ve never seen that problem. So there’s no textbook out there for the problem.

Jim Baldo: Maybe not even any white papers out there to take a look at.

Jim Baldo: And it’s it’s an approach where you lace. Do you lay things out on the whiteboard, so to speak, or or during blogs or discussions and what whatnot with your colleagues to come up with a solution. So, Mary and Bernie, if there’s anything else you guys want to add, please please go for it.

Bernard Schmidt: No, I think you pretty much covered it. I don’t have anything to add myself.

Mary Baldwin: Agreed. I I think you could it. It’s a huge field. It’s constantly growing. And that’s kind of why we’re constantly growing. We just since I joined the program, I think we’ve added 4 concentrations and a whole gaggle of courses, because we’re always working to kind of keep up with those changes.

Jim Baldo: Right? Thanks. Okay, Tabitha, we go on to the next slide.

Jim Baldo: Okay, I think I’m gonna let Mary yeah, take this one here.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah. So our program is a 10 course program. 5 of the courses, as we’ve kind of talked about just a little bit are core classes. They are going to give you your foundation for you to build on, and that also includes that capstone experience that Professor Schmidt talked about. So first, st we’ll just kind of talk about these core courses. Ait 580 is a course that covers a whole bunch of topics. You’re going to be using python SQL. Learning, using some r doing some

Mary Baldwin: work with. Aws, I think all of the sections are doing that right now. Correct. Professor Schmidt has everyone taken that on aws for ait 580, or.

Bernard Schmidt: Yes, every yeah. Yeah. In fact. I think Dr. Foxwell is.

Bernard Schmidt: It wasn’t in the online program, and I believe this summer he’s incorporating it into the online, into the online course.

Mary Baldwin: Fabulous. But you learn a little bit of everything that you kind of expand upon later. Cs. 504. Dr. Baldo does teach that it is a great course on data mining data structures. You do some machine learning there as well, or 531 is one of our modeling and kind of like predictive modeling classes. It’s excel based. And so you’re able to do some of that predictive work there. Statistics 515 is like our base visualizations. Course it’s it’s

Mary Baldwin: are based. Is kind of the the coding that is used in that course. And it’s just kind of your solid foundation. So those 4 classes

Mary Baldwin: give you a broad basis in the field. The capstone is the final course. You do so. The other 4 are the 1st 4 classes, the capstone you do at the very end. And, as Professor Schmidt said, it is unique. All these other classes you take in the program are 8 weeks. They’re asynchronous. They kind of work with a working person schedule. The capstone is unique. You have to meet once a week for lecture. It’s a synchronous course.

Mary Baldwin: It is a full semester course instead of 8 weeks. And you are working with the team every day because you’re working on a real world problem. And so you have to have that kind of continuous work. So one thing I’m going to touch on later is kind of like pathway. Most of my students, if you are taking classes, every semester are going to be able to finish the program in 6 semesters. And one of those reasons is, we want you to take the capstone by itself

Mary Baldwin: at the very end. But yeah, so these are the 1st kind of 5 core classes. And we did talk about the certificate, so the certificate’s great. Some students will start there and then move to the masters. But another thing you can do while you’re in the program is declare the certificate alongside the masters. And so for folks who maybe are looking to get a pay raise because they got another credential, or you’re looking to shift jobs. You’re able to get the certificate

Mary Baldwin: declared, and actually awarded. After you finish, finish just these 1st 4 classes, ait 580 cs. 504, or 531 and stat. 515. So you get that credential just on the way to the masters. If you want to do that when you’re in the masters, you just talk to me. I can help you with that, and talk about all the paperwork and fun stuff, but that is an option for all students in the masters as well. And we can actually go on.

Mary Baldwin: I think, to the next slide

Mary Baldwin: where we’re gonna start talking about your other 5 classes. So those are kind of the core.

George Mason Online Admissions: Awesome. You already answered one of the questions I had so thank.

Mary Baldwin: Hi.

George Mason Online Admissions: You’ll see me taking notes over here.

Mary Baldwin: Because

Mary Baldwin: so the other 5 courses in your program are your concentration courses, your electives. And that’s where we are able to kind of pull on the strength of the program. One of the strengths of the program, which is the diversity of the courses available to kind of mix and match, to get the skill sets that are going to work for you and your career goals. So currently, we have 100 plus courses in the on ground program. So if you look at our catalog page, you’ll see

Mary Baldwin: a whole bunch of stuff. But some of our most popular courses have been transitioned to that 8 week format for the online program. So that includes some of our business analytics, courses, marketing, research, advanced data, mining and data mining for business marketing analytics. I think people analytics is offered sometimes as well.

Mary Baldwin: I need to double check. Don’t count me on that. I have to double check all that. But those are quite popular for folks who want to focus on business functions. We have some great and very cool digital forensics classes. If you have networking experience. If you’re interested in cybercrime, those digital forensics and network forensics classes are quite cool. We also have several courses from our systems. Engineering operations

Mary Baldwin: Research department, on applied predictive analytics. Things like decision, risk analysis, heterogeneous data fusion, which I think is super cool, even just the name is super cool. But it’s a

Mary Baldwin: cool topic as well, and those are pretty intensive. They give students really good skill sets in terms of decision, risk, predictive modeling. If you’re interested in finance or anything with risk. Honestly, these can be quite good classes, and then we have courses from our ist department.

Mary Baldwin: and this is where we have a lot of classes in machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing. And then also, like more data engineering skills, classes like Ait 614, which goes over a lot of things like SQL. Hadoop, pig hive you know, Apache spark kind of tool sets, and so you kind of get a mixture of different skill sets there.

Mary Baldwin: There’s a lot of options to choose from honestly, and that’s where I come in. Kind of talk to you about those. Compare and contrast what you would learn in them, and kind of put together a schedule that works for you, so that you get the skill sets that you want and need. And, as I did say before most students, if you are studying as many classes as you can take each semester, you’ll finish in 6 semesters.

Mary Baldwin: The reason for that.

Mary Baldwin: the 1st 4 semesters. You can typically take 2 classes, a semester. They’re going to be 8 week classes back to back. So you’re never studying more than one class at a time which makes it a little bit easier to manage when you were working, or just have a busy schedule in your final 2 semesters, you generally will take, like your final elective in one, and then your capstone by itself in the last semester. Now, if you have questions about that kind, of course. Ordering.

Mary Baldwin: please let me know. Taking the capstone by itself is pretty important, especially if you’re working full time. Just so. You have all the time to kind of put towards it, because it is pretty intensive. It’s good for that reason, but it’s time consuming. Did I miss anything for curriculum, Professor Schmidt? Dr. Baldo, that you want to talk about.

Jim Baldo: Wanted to just mention one thing here, the courses that Mary was was going over, that you really want to take advantage of the advisor. We are very fortunate to have a professional advisor, and the wealth of knowledge.

Jim Baldo: because and and the very important thing that Mary had mentioned was plan.

Jim Baldo: And and you can work with with her to to

Jim Baldo: construct a plan that will allow you, because some of these courses may require you to take one course before the other, and it’s not that all of them are like that, but there are some that are like that. So you want to sort of plan things out.

Jim Baldo: And and Mary has been through so many of these pathways. And and even with

Jim Baldo: these courses here, there’s a lot of pathways, obviously, that you can take. And also she mentioned as Mary mentioned, 5 electives.

Jim Baldo: And so you want to plan out, you know we’ll we’ll

Jim Baldo: which ones do I want to take which ones are important to me? And I think that that’s that’s a that’s a big decision, you know. Because,

Jim Baldo: you have to. There’s the 5 foundation courses. And then so you really want to, and talking it through with somebody like Mary, and you can always Ping Tabitha, my Professor Schner, myself as well. If you want to talk through some of this stuff,

Jim Baldo: but the planning, I think, is really really important today, and especially in this program here is making sure that you get what you want out of the program. Because, like, I said, there’s lots and lots of different pathways that you can take here.

Jim Baldo: so anyways, yeah, no, I think you did a good job, Mary. Bernie, do you have anything? Oh, go ahead, Mary.

Mary Baldwin: No, I wanted to throw one last thing in I didn’t mention. Dane, 6, 98. That’s our elective, which is independent research. I strongly recommend that for students who think they may want to do a Phd. In the future. Or

Mary Baldwin: if you’re working in a field, you have subject matter expertise. And you have a topic you’re really interested in doing. Independent research can be a really good option for one of your electives, and then I think I hope I’m saying your name right. Helene, in the chat did ask about mechanical engineering and financial engineering classes. That’s kind of where I was talking about the difference between our catalog page which has those concentrations

Mary Baldwin: and the online program. So not all the courses have been transferred to the online program. What I’d ask is, maybe like, send me an email. You can reach out to the datamine at Gmuedu email. And we can talk about the courses you were interested in in financial, engineering or mechanical engineering to kind of get a feel for

Mary Baldwin: what works for you. Since those classes have not been converted to the online format. There may be options, but we should probably just chat. I’ll put the program email in the chat for you, Bernie. I’m sorry if I cut you off if you had anything.

Bernard Schmidt: No, no, you didn’t at all. I think you summarized it right is is that the even while the on campus program has well over a hundred courses because we are multidisciplinary. The limiting factor for the online program is the number of faculty who own those courses who want to convert it from a

Bernard Schmidt: on campus format to an asynchronous online format. That’s that’s the restriction right there. But we were. We’ve been very lucky that.

Bernard Schmidt: you know the systems engineering operations research. They were one of the 1st ones to do that for our online program as well as the information sciences and technology group. And and of course, recent. A couple of years ago we added the business school courses so.

Jim Baldo: Yeah, so I would, and then I’ll let Mary and Bernie chime in as well on this. I want to emphasize something that that Bernie Just and Mary both talked about. These are asynchronous, which means that

Jim Baldo: you don’t ever have to talk to the instructor, you know, in theory, and in in the way the course is set up, you would never have to really talk to the instructor. So when we design the courses, we have to make it so that when that’s why they’re so difficult to put together, making everything asynchronous like this.

Jim Baldo: Some instructors I happen to be. One of them do like to reach out, talk to the students, encourage them to contact the instructor. But it is true, all of these courses here, as was noted by both Mary and Professor Schmidt is that all of these courses are 100% asynchronous. You would never have to talk to the instructor.

Mary Baldwin: The instructors are there obviously available for questions. My students typically do reach out to professors. They’re available to you. But it’s kind of designed so that, like, if you have a weird work schedule, if you have family obligations, you can do your study at a particular time. Capstone is the only exclusion, and this does kind of tie in with jewel. You asked whether there are live lectures. Now we’ll talk about kind of what the classroom looks like, and

Mary Baldwin: both both of you can kind of talk about how you run an asynchronous class in the program, but the only live lecture you would be getting in the program would be for the capstone course. That is the the one course where you will have a required live lecture.

Mary Baldwin: Alright.

Jim Baldo: Okay. So I’m gonna talk a little bit about some trends.

Jim Baldo: and and this trend has been here for a a little while. But it goes back to all of the various types of

Jim Baldo: data sets or data sources that exist in the in the in the world today. And then what do we do with all that data? It continue, it’s continuously growing and

Jim Baldo: and it sort of makes things difficult, especially for the the analytics teams when they need data.

Jim Baldo: And we typically in many cases, it’s it’s very costly and and time consuming

Jim Baldo: for us to go off and get data get it in the appropriate form that we can use it for a particular analytic. And as I had noted earlier, sometimes for some analytics, that data set may be good just the way it is.

Jim Baldo: You can pull it out of the lake, you can use it, and in other cases there’s a considerable amount of of

Jim Baldo: things that we have to do to it. A lot of engineering like feature engineering and things like that that we gotta do to it. Conditioning, balancing it. making sure that it’s it’s not biased making sure that it doesn’t. It hasn’t been poisoned in any way. I mean, there’s there’s a there’s a plethora of things that we have to do. So what

Jim Baldo: we’re seeing right now is that we’re seeing the creation

Jim Baldo: of what’s called the data product.

Jim Baldo: Okay? So the the world today, as we see it, is, there’s a lot of data in excel spreadsheets or in in spreadsheets in general.

Jim Baldo: And these create somewhat of a problem. Although

Jim Baldo: their spreadsheets are very powerful, very useful. They’re not going away. They’re gonna they’re gonna remain for for many, many years from now. But what we’re looking at right now is trying to make this sort of

Jim Baldo: this notion of a data product where it has, we wrap it with a lot of metadata to describe what it is. We also have an ability to sort of. Say, here’s some sort of a metadata can talk about the data products quality.

Jim Baldo: We have to be concerned about the governance of this. So we have to concern about privacy.

Jim Baldo: Who can see this? Maybe maybe maybe I can only see a part of it. But Professor Schmidt and Mary can see, can see everything and get the whole product.

Jim Baldo: and and then also this notion that’s coming about, and how it’s monetized is still a big is still up in the air. But you know we have a contract.

Jim Baldo: And and in that contractors there’s a data specification that provides some sort of

Jim Baldo: guarantees that someone who’s going to be a consumer. They also may be paying for this this particular data that they’re going to get the following.

Jim Baldo: okay, so

Jim Baldo: so we’re seeing like from the producers over to the consumers and in the center here, we’re we’re beginning to see these products.

Jim Baldo: and this thing caught my caught my attention 4 or 5 years ago, when I started to look at this notion, this concept of a of a data product

Jim Baldo: and

Jim Baldo: I’ve consulted for a couple of organizations right now that have tried to realize this. And and in order to do this I will tell you one of the big key things that you have to have is, you’ve got to have some really. You have set people with some general skill, sets that 1st and foremost, as many of you may already know.

Jim Baldo: You know, there’s a data set out there, but getting access to it, even in a company

Jim Baldo: that owns all their data can be like, you know, pulling teeth, it can really really be problematic.

Jim Baldo: And then when you get the data, what you do with it, if you run analytics on it

Jim Baldo: and the results that you get from it. Those could have impacts. Okay, so depending on the quality of that data product and and how it’s used. And from an analytics perspective, it says something.

Jim Baldo: and you’ll be surprised or not surprised. More than likely someone might disagree

Jim Baldo: with what that data is telling is be is what’s being revealed by the analytic. From that data I can give you a really good example of this law enforcement.

Jim Baldo: You start to collect various types of of data

Jim Baldo: could be on crimes that you’re you’re looking at trends in various geographical locations and the

Jim Baldo: the officers, the law enforcement folks will start to look at this data. And in many cases they are there in these areas. And they’ll say, Hey, this is not reflective of what’s really going on

Jim Baldo: okay? And and we see this

Jim Baldo: in in 1st responders as well, and in many cases they might come to us as Professor Schmidt mentioned with the capstones. We might have 1st responders that give us data where they’re going out 1st responders like

Jim Baldo: medic teams. And they they’ve already done analytics. And they give the data to us just to sort of as a test case. What do you guys see? Okay, so this, this whole notion of handling the data

Jim Baldo: has become so important is that the data has now become the data layer.

Jim Baldo: And from this data layer is emerging this new thing, this new product called the data product.

Jim Baldo: And it’s starting to take hold. And I think we’re going to see more and more of it. But even if the concept of data product

Jim Baldo: isn’t there? I think the spirit of it is gonna be there. And so

Jim Baldo: in again, my interests are a lot in this pipeline, because it is so important as a data analytics engineer. When I hand this off to another engineering team that’s going to perform analytics on it. It’s a pretty big responsibility.

Jim Baldo: Because, as I said before, you have some. You have some

Jim Baldo: subject matter experts, or you have some some other consumers down there that are going to look at the results.

Jim Baldo: And

Jim Baldo: there are actionable things that can occur, I mean, so you might want to. Law enforcement may want to say they want to may want to strengthen their presence in a particular area. You’ve got to make sure that you’re right, especially if you’re taking some of your assets from another area that you think is relatively safe.

Jim Baldo: So anyways, I hope I planted the seed of data products.

Jim Baldo: you know. And you can, you can go off and and search and and and look at. And there’s lots of people look at it a lot of different ways. It’s it’s it’s a concept at this point in time.

Jim Baldo: But I think those those features that I have connected to that data product queue are still pretty important, and those are not easy. Okay, there. There’s still a lot of things that need to go on to support those sort of things.

Jim Baldo: Okay, thanks. Let me go to the next slide.

Jim Baldo: Okay? And

Jim Baldo: there’s been a lot of things that have happened from an industry perspective. One of the 1st things that’s happened is that storage has become so cheap. Okay? And and over the years. So so now, we don’t throw data away.

Jim Baldo: We, we keep everything. So data comes in. It’s immutable. And we keep it.

Jim Baldo: Also, data can be distributed when you talk about things like zettabytes of data worldwide growing

Jim Baldo: exponentially. You know, your data is not gonna be in all one spot.

Jim Baldo: we collect a lot of data. I mean, just think about

Jim Baldo: all of the satellites that are up orbiting the earth, collecting data and sending that returning that data back down to ground stations. Even though those pipes are very, very small, they’re continuously sending data down there, and it’s continuously being collected. We’re continuously archiving it. And now we’re beginning to be able to process it. I mean, we’ve you’ve probably heard these stories from some of our

Jim Baldo: when NASA sends some of these probes out, they’re sending back so much data that they at one time a lot of the analysts were saying, Hey, it might take us a decade before we even get to that data, because there’s so much of it.

Jim Baldo: But we are seeing rapid advances with with chipsets and whatnot.

Jim Baldo: It is currently unbelievable from my perspective, seeing all the data centers that are going up. In fact, Professor Schmidt and I were talking about this this afternoon. He lives very close to an area in the Northern Virginia area that has seen a huge growth in in data centers.

Jim Baldo: And we’re also, you know, we still continue to get the the great folks, our our great chip makers continue to build faster Chips and and Gpu’s Mpus tpus. Just, it’s incredible

Jim Baldo: as well as the advances that we’re getting with algorithms. But that data is growing. And so what happened was we. We started to fill these things up which were called data lakes. So we just stuffed all the data into object stores. It was cheap.

Jim Baldo: And then we said, Okay, we’ll figure out what to do with this. Professor Schmidt will figure out how to get all this data out of those lakes. And what happens is those lakes sometimes get polluted because we were throwing everything in there. And so then we decided to to evolve into what was called the Data Lake House.

Jim Baldo: We had some structure storage back there with things like, you know, we had good warehouses, good relational databases, no SQL. Things things that people were really taking care of, but it seemed to be again very centralized.

Jim Baldo: And finally, this notion and this is this is a concept. Data. Mesh is a concept. Somebody said, Hey, you know, for years we’ve had the Hr these Hr systems. We’ve had these financial systems. We’ve had these business development systems, you know, on and on and on all these various tools that we’re taking care of special domains of data.

Jim Baldo: And when the data mess architecture came out, the the one of the the.

Jim Baldo: the principle, the founding principles of it was that it said, Hey, leave that data with the domain experts.

Jim Baldo: and then put an umbrella, so to speak. And I’m I’m generalizing this quite a bit. Put an umbrella on this that will allow those accessibility

Jim Baldo: to those various domains through the data, mesh architecture.

Jim Baldo: And so the real important things with the data mesh architecture that I have here. One is at the top, you see, governance, federated governance, and what we mean by that is that these data, these data domains are federated and we have governance that allows access to them so that we don’t violate. So you got policy that gets converted into some sort of inactable or enforceable governance.

Jim Baldo: so there’s security. There’s privacy. I I spent just to give you an example of how important this is. I was on Sabbatical for 2 years over to the Department of Homeland Security, and

Jim Baldo: I had I came in, and I started in May of 2022. In July of

Jim Baldo: 2022, I had 3 or 4 data sets that I wanted to bring into their cloud.

Jim Baldo: so I was told, hey, you gotta go to our privacy office, and I did. Now I left

Jim Baldo: the Department of Homeland Security in May of 2024.

Jim Baldo: And my data set forms were still being processed by that entity.

Jim Baldo: Okay? And and it’s just that there is so much risk because they have to go through legal and whatnot for the data sets that I wanted to use.

Jim Baldo: you know, it’s it’s a tough problem. So that governance in order. You know, it’s important that an organization has a handle on that and then at the bottom is that when somebody needs a data set. When data, when an analytics

Jim Baldo: engineering team needs a data set, they would prefer.

Jim Baldo: instead of having to come to me and say, this is what I need. And and then I ask all these sort of I got to go through the solicitation, sess session and say, Is it this type? What about this? And what about that? What you’d like to have is all these data products there

Jim Baldo: that you can go in from a self service perspective. Look at the specification. Look at the data specification, look at the data contract and then pick pick it. Pick your data sets, hey? Just go in there and then it knows it’s Jim Baldo. This is what Jim’s allowed to have and it and it

Jim Baldo: gives me this. So we’ve been seeing there’s a lot of technologies that are supporting this databricks

Jim Baldo: had started out with a with a proprietary standard that that they were offering up and and then the Apache foundation came up this this thing called the iceberg. And so what it does is it provides the data in a tabular form in these materialized views. And so we’re seeing some pretty good standards that are the standard tools or de facto tools.

Jim Baldo: That that are coming up, and and the industry is standardizing on now. So I expect to see. You know, I’m not saying that data mesh is going to stick.

Jim Baldo: but something like it will be there. There’s another competing appro industry trend with what’s called a fabric, and not to be confused with what Microsoft calls their data fabric.

Jim Baldo: but that requires, in order to do data fabric. Not only does it require governance, but it requires metadata for your data sets. So those 2 key things being able to address governance with your data being able to address the metadata so that you can find it. And and you can sort of interpret AI. This metadata describes what I really need

Jim Baldo: is extremely is extremely important.

Jim Baldo: So, okay,

George Mason Online Admissions: Fascinating.

George Mason Online Admissions: Thank you so much.

Jim Baldo: Sure.

George Mason Online Admissions: Now we’re gonna talk about, what does the online classroom look like?

Jim Baldo: Okay, well, I I’ll say a few words on this, since I do teach the Cs 5 0, 4 online. On course.

Jim Baldo: you know. I’ll let Professor Schmidt add into this, because he’s in the process we up until the spring of this year we were using blackboard as our online. Actually, this is our course tool. And we switched over now to canvas.

Jim Baldo: There’s certainly some commonalities. But there’s certainly some some differences. So now all of our courses starting this summer are are taught off of the canvas, the canvas platform. But the online program

Jim Baldo: the course and and and the courses vary with this, I can tell you, for the foundation course for Cs, 5, 0, 4. Which is our data mining.

Jim Baldo: our data management data mining course. I have 8 modules in it, because we have 8 week sessions. So I have 8 modules in it, and in each of the modules. It’s very structured. And so all of the courses are set up this way, based on modules. And then in those modules you’ll have things like videos.

Jim Baldo: You might have some links to go off and look at reading material. There may be some.

Jim Baldo: There’ll be possibly some quizzes, some of the videos. They test your knowledge. So you go through part of the video, it stops. You ask a couple of questions just to test your knowledge to make sure that things are sinking in, and

Jim Baldo: and sometimes there’s. And then there’s assignments in Cs. 5 0, 4 I base most. I try to make most of the assignments. I try to give you some some exercises where you get some experience, because the experience across the the the students that are in there is quite diverse.

Jim Baldo: As Professor Schmidt noted. for Cs 5 before I also use aws so and Professor Schmidt can talk more about this. We

Jim Baldo: we both Professor Schmidt and I are are registered with Aws Academy. So we get Aws Academy accounts which gives the students some sandbox accounts where you can actually go off. Aws, gives us $50 in credit for each student.

Jim Baldo: And so we? I I’ve set the courses up so that you can do some assignments using aws.

Jim Baldo: and within that $50 range so

Jim Baldo: that so it’s pretty much you know, there’s there’s videos. So some. And and I have a couple where I don’t. I didn’t do the video. I just give the slides. Please go through the slides.

Jim Baldo: And then some quizzes. I usually always have quizzes with them, and then they’re they’re couched in, or they’re they’re they’re in a 1 week range. So usually there’s a there’s a set of things that you have to accomplish within that that week.

Jim Baldo: And then you move on to the to the next week. So you do have some deadlines. Now.

Jim Baldo: what people are gonna ask me is about, well, how much time do I need to spend.

Jim Baldo: And when we worked with the rise point, mentors the course.

Jim Baldo: the online course instructors are are actually course designers who help us design the course.

Jim Baldo: The online, like watching the videos reading some papers or things like that.

Jim Baldo: you’re probably gonna spend anywhere from you’re gonna spend probably anywhere from

Jim Baldo: 12 to 15 HA week

Jim Baldo: on the course. Okay, so you sort of have to.

Jim Baldo: What I strongly advise as well as the Rise Point course designers. And and they’re very adamant about this. And they’re right is that you need to spread it out.

Jim Baldo: Okay, so do not wait till the weekend, because a lot of people think well, you know, I work hard, you know, work during the week I got 40 h, 8 h days, you know I have a family come home, you know dinner with the children, and and you know and yes, you got to do all those things.

Jim Baldo: And

Jim Baldo: I know what that’s like. I went through a master’s and a Phd. Working full time with a family. So I know what that’s like. But you gotta spread it out.

Jim Baldo: Okay? So you wanna make sure that

Jim Baldo: you spend a couple of hours a night, you know, after you have dinner with the family and spend some time with the kids or something. Then, you know, you want to just some time for yourself, you know. Go into a room someplace and spend a couple of hours. I think you could do that.

Jim Baldo: You maybe take Friday night off, or something like that, and then you’re going to have to spend some time on the weekends as well. So I really think it’s anywhere from, you know, 12 to 15 h now the the real trick and Mary sort of mentioned this, she said, and and Professor Schmidt as well is that even though they’re asynchronous, you still have access to the instructor. Okay?

Jim Baldo: And so I always tell my students that if I give you an assignment

Jim Baldo: and you get stuck for 15 min, you can’t move forward.

Jim Baldo: you know. Shoot me an email

Jim Baldo: one of the things that we do here is we set up a a Microsoft teams channel

Jim Baldo: for the course. And you can. You know you can text, and most of us are pretty responsive if we get a text and we’ll you know, you say, Hey, can can I meet with you for 5 or 10 min. And you, it’s it’s amazing, because sometimes you get stuck on the littlest thing.

Jim Baldo: And you know, you text the instructor and instructor says, Okay, let’s let’s just come on and do a virtual session. Show me where the problem is. You talk through it, and within 5 or 10 min you get it solved instead of you sitting there for 2 h, you know, banging, trying every different way, and you get frustrated and tired. So I think that’s a very important thing. Use your instructor, you know. Get to your instructor when you get stuck like that.

Jim Baldo: and I think that’s good.

Jim Baldo: That’s good. Most instructors are responsive. If you do find one. That’s not.

Jim Baldo: you know Mary’s there, and she’ll reach out to me or to Professor Schmidt or to Tabitha, and then we’ll we’ll find out what’s going on. And and you know.

Jim Baldo: if you’re you’re doing something late at like 10 or 11 o’clock at night, and the instructor doesn’t respond back, hey? You know

Jim Baldo: they have. They’re human, too. They have to sleep, and they have things like that. But normally they’ll get back to you. Okay?

Jim Baldo: And I always say, if you get stuck on something, put it aside, but continue to do something else. Usually those modules are set up so that you can have actually multiple parallel activities going on. So you don’t have to. Just because you’re stuck. There doesn’t mean you can’t. You can’t move on to something else, you know, finishing off the lecture videos or looking at

Jim Baldo: other content. That’s there.

Jim Baldo: And I do want. These are graduate courses now. So a lot of them are set up. In some cases there is no answer. Okay, I mean you some. Sometimes the questions that they’re being posed to you may require you to do some research, and the instructors looking for

Jim Baldo: your approach, your thoughts. How are you going to solve this particular problem?

Jim Baldo: Sometimes there is, there may not necessarily be a right answer. And that’s and this program I mean the the sort of things that you do

Jim Baldo: in many cases.

Jim Baldo: You know the reason you become so valuable because we’ve never done this before.

Jim Baldo: Okay, and that’s the important thing there.

Jim Baldo: So I hope that gives you a little bit of a

Jim Baldo: of you. This this particular picture of me here is is the introduction, and like I introduced myself, even though there might be a different instructor teaching the course. You know. You click on that, and you you can. You can watch it for

Jim Baldo: And and you got to be careful with with these types of videos, because you can get tired listening to them. So that’s why we always say this to spread it out.

Jim Baldo: So that you don’t get bored with Jim

Jim Baldo: talking and babbling all the time.

Bernard Schmidt: One thing I would like to emphasize, to remind everybody is, even though this is an 8 week format. It covers the same amount of material you would have in a normal 15 week. Course.

Bernard Schmidt: Yeah. So

Bernard Schmidt: so one weekend in the online program is the equivalent of 2 weeks in an on ground course.

Jim Baldo: Thank you for bringing that up, Professor Schmidt, because that’s a really really important point. And the way I’d like to, you know, to paraphrase. What Professor Schmidt just said is that it’s a concentrated pill. I mean, it is concentrated. So that’s why you want to spend those 12 to 15 HA week.

Jim Baldo: and you got to discipline yourself to do it. But if you do, you’ll get through. There’s no question about that.

Jim Baldo: But Professor Schmidt is right. And and Mary was shaking her head there as well. Because, you can’t. It’s really difficult to leave it to the weekend you’re gonna spend, you know, 8 h on Saturday, and another, you know, 7 h, maybe on on Sunday.

Jim Baldo: Your ability to assimilate the material is not linear. There. It’s it’s

Jim Baldo: you’re going to get tired. You’re going to get fatigued. That’s why it’s much better to lay it out, plus it gives the gray cells a little bit of chance to fire and think because they’re working in the background for you.

Mary Baldwin: All, I’ll say, because I know we’re over time. And I apologize. Tabitha, because I’m I’m taking more of your time

Mary Baldwin: because they’re accelerated classes reach out early and often reach out to me the moment you start feeling like you’re struggling. If you need advice, how to talk to a Professor, how to approach something, even if you want to talk about, you know kind of study methods, or how to plan out your schedule. Especially in your 1st semester. It can be different if you’ve never done a graduate program before. If it’s been a while since you’ve been in school, or if you’re just not used to online classes. We want to support you.

Mary Baldwin: Reach out to me. I’m happy to kind of, you know, troubleshoot things and help you kind of get used to the new medium as well. But yeah, reach out early often. Don’t be ashamed. That’s what we’re here for. Ask for help when you need it. Okay.

Jim Baldo: And I’d like to emphasize what Mary just said, because Mary is truly your lifeguard. I mean, she’s out there with the binoculars, but she doesn’t see everybody because she can’t. There’s there’s just a lot of things, you know.

Jim Baldo: you know, contact her and and let her know it’s it’s more than likely she’s. She’s seen somebody go down this path before, and she has some resolutions that she can help you get over the problem.

George Mason Online Admissions: I love that

George Mason Online Admissions: That’s honestly like I’m I’m the 1st 1st line.

George Mason Online Admissions: and I’m always talking about calendar blocking and communicate. They don’t know if you’re not talking so you know.

George Mason Online Admissions: That’s I’m always, you know, promoting that as well. I’m a big fan of calendar booking. So with that being said, here is my slide as enrollment coordinator. That is what I and my team do for you. We support you through the application process to get you into the program and help you through that process. So we have a fantastic team.

George Mason Online Admissions: And just we all love what we do. I know students that have worked with me. I tell them all the time I love my job. I love getting to be that stepping stone to their future. So I’m just going to go over briefly, because and thank you all for hanging with us that have been able to hang out. Still.

George Mason Online Admissions: as far as the application process goes, it’s I’ll be honest. It’s very, very easy. They make it easy. That’s what you have us here for is to help you through each step of the way as well.

George Mason Online Admissions: One of the things that you know. Of course, you need to start the application process. That is, through the online portal at George Mason, and our team has all of the materials, all of the information to support you through that process. You do need your transcripts.

George Mason Online Admissions: A letter of recommendation. Now for the certificate program. You do not need a letter of recommendation, but you do for the masters.

George Mason Online Admissions: An experience grid that’s not listed on here, but that is something that it’s not out there on the electronic application. But we provide it for you. That’s an important part of the application as well.

George Mason Online Admissions: And then a personal statement. I tell my students, tell us, why. Why are you wanting to come to George Mason? Why are you wanting to do this program. Where do you see it taking you? They want to know you. I tell tell people it’s kind of like an interview on paper share who you are and why this program is a good fit for you, and why you’re looking to get started at George Mason. So we’re super excited to help you through that process.

George Mason Online Admissions: Those I love what I do, and my teammates love what they do as well. So if you do not have an enrollment coordinator yet that you’re working with. We can get you in touch with one. We will make sure that you get connected. I’ll be sharing the contact information on the next slide. But we are happy to help you through the process.

George Mason Online Admissions: And I’m super super excited, you know, to help you through that as well.

George Mason Online Admissions: let’s see. And we have a question real quick. Let’s see

George Mason Online Admissions: applying to a program. Besides, the knowledge is a networking function. That being said, how is networking chances in the program?

George Mason Online Admissions: and how is the how is the process to switch to ground like from from in person that type of thing. Great question. I’ll let Mary cause I support online only.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, so I’ll take that over. So if you stay, if you start in the online program, and for whatever reason you move close to the campus. Something like that happens, and you want to move on ground. It’s pretty easy reach out to me. At that point. We can talk about it. There are differences in tuition rates between the

Mary Baldwin: on ground and online program. There are a few other like administrative things. So I would say, it’s pretty easy. You can only do it once you’ll have to discuss it with me. If you’re talking about networking in terms of like getting connected with folks. You can do that both in the online and in the on ground program, online, students are able to get involved with research centers. Even if you’re doing like virtual collaboration, reaching out to

Mary Baldwin: to research faculty, asking questions like that. There are student groups. There are some virtual events that happen, career events that happen that are virtual. So there’s networking opportunities available both online and on campus. If you were to move on campus, the fuse building has got these great spaces. That’s more Dr. Baldo’s expertise. And if that becomes a thing.

Mary Baldwin: talk to us and we can kind of give you all that information. But yeah, it.

Mary Baldwin: I would say, if you want the details of like cost difference and all that stuff between on ground and online, email us at [email protected]. I can provide all those nitty, gritty details so that you can kind of compare them, and that’s for anybody. But yes, networking. You can definitely do in both programs.

George Mason Online Admissions: Thanks. Mary. Yeah, definitely. And George Mesa has a fantastic career services department as well. I

George Mason Online Admissions: a lot of people don’t realize that. So I know I talk a lot about that when I’m talking with with prospective students as well. So yeah. And I wanted to make sure you had a chance to get the information definitely reach out if and if you have any questions, feel free to share them. Here we have the experts here.

George Mason Online Admissions: We’ve had some great questions tonight.

Jim Baldo: Yeah. Just would like to add, like to thank everybody for for coming on board with your your interest. Like to thank Tabitha for setting things up, and Marian and Professor Schmidt and please, as as Mary indicated, you know, reach out to us the 4 of us here. If we can’t answer the question, we’ll find some some way to get the question answered answered for you.

George Mason Online Admissions: Absolutely

George Mason Online Admissions: thanks so much. We’re so excited to have you all tonight. And does anybody have any other questions?

George Mason Online Admissions: I had a few, but they got answered throughout the presentation. So.

Jim Baldo: Thing.

George Mason Online Admissions: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Mary Baldwin: We all love to talk, so don’t hesitate to reach out and thank you all for listening to us for so long. And thank you, Tabitha, for running everything and being so wonderful, helping students coming into the program.

George Mason Online Admissions: Absolutely I love it. It’s so much fun.

Jim Baldo: That’s true.

George Mason Online Admissions: Thank you.

George Mason Online Admissions: Thanks everybody. Thank you. Everybody.

Jim Baldo: Have a good evening, stay cool.

Mary Baldwin: Yes.

Jim Baldo: Buh-bye.