Virtual Open House MS in Data Analytics Engineering Transcript

George Mason Online Admissions: Good evening, everybody. My name is Susan. I’m an Enrollment Coordinator on behalf of George Mason, and we’re here tonight for the online Masters of Data Analytics of Engineering, along with the Graduate Certificate. And very fortunate to be joined with Dr. Baldo and Mr. Schmidt who, so Dr. Baldo is the program director, Mr. Schmidt is, the assistant program director, and also the academic advisor, Mary Baldwin. So, I’m thrilled to have them here, and we’re gonna go ahead and kick it off in a few minutes. If you can let me know in the chat whether you can hear me okay or not, I’d appreciate it. And thank you for joining us. And if you can also mention where you’re joining us from. I guess everybody’s being very shy, because I see the participants, but nobody’s answering.

Jim Baldo: There we go.

George Mason Online Admissions: So, I assume you can hear me okay. Oh, somebody. There we go. Thank you. Oh, wow! Well, thank you so much for joining for all the way from Ghana, that’s amazing, thank you.

Mary Baldwin: Looks like we have some local folks from Virginia, too. Hi, everybody.

George Mason Online Admissions: Oh, yep. Thanks for joining. So we’re just giving it a little bit of time to let everybody join. And then we’ll go ahead and get started. So last time I checked, we had 15 registrants. And right now, we have about 10, so thanks for joining us.

Mary Baldwin: Did you want to start, or should we wait for some of the rest of the people to come in?

Jim Baldo: No, I think… I think we can get started. I think that’ll… that’ll be fine.

George Mason Online Admissions: Okay. Again, my name is Susan. I’m an Enrollment Coordinator on behalf of George Mason, and we’re here tonight for the Online Masters of Data Analytics of Engineering, as well as the Graduate Certificate in the Data Analytics of Engineering. And I’m here to assist with the application process. So if you have any questions on that, let me know. And we’re joined here with the program director, and… Assistant Program Director and Academic Advisor for the program. And so, they’re here to answer all your questions. So thanks again for joining us. So, the agenda for this evening is to meet our wonderful presenters, and why should you do this program? The driving forces behind data analytics, Details on the curriculum. Industry trends, the online classroom. And of course, admissions requirements and Q&A. And feel free to post your questions, In the Q&A session. Throughout, or through the chat. We won’t be really raising our hand here. But through the Q&A. And without further ado, Dr. Baldo, would you like to kick us off?

Jim Baldo: Sure, sure. Well, first, I’d like to welcome all of our attendees here this evening. Thank you for coming on to get some insights into our program, Data Analytics Engineering. A little bit about myself. I spent… I have about 40-plus years of industry experience, before I became a full-time associate professor, at George Mason University. I was, I was at… Adjunct professor here for about 19 years, as well. I recently moved the program, down to Mason Square, so I just wanted… because if I forget to tell you that, that’s not… that is part of the background here. So we’re down… the program now is down in the Arlington, campus in the new fuse building that we have there. So I worked in industry. I spent, 15 years at, at Oracle. I’ve spent, a number of years supporting, commercial industry, government, and defense. So I have, a diverse background with respect to, Software and data analytics. I’ve been, I’m still a practicing engineer, So, we, my experience base right now, as director of the program, is primarily focused… I spend most of my time these days with data, handling data. Still do analytics, no question about that. But data has been the key, focus, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that as we go further. I have… I have a PhD from George Mason University. It’s in information technology. I have a master’s in engineering and computer engineering from the University of South Florida. And I have, a master’s and an undergraduate degree in chemistry. So my, my pathway is, In some cases, similar to a number of the students that are in this program. Not all of our students come from engineering backgrounds. Not all come from computer science backgrounds. Some come from math, chemistry, biology. We have folks that come in with, business or accounting-type degrees as well. So, that is the interesting aspect of data analytics engineering, or analytics in general, is that it comes in with people with, diverse backgrounds. With that, I’ll turn it over to my, Great Assistant Director, Professor Bernie Schmidt.

Bernard Schmidt: Thank you, Dr. Baldo. Like Dr. Baldo, I have a background in industry. I have had over 35 years in industry before becoming an academic myself. 15 years ago, started as a professor of IT at Northern Virginia Community College, joined George Mason Five years ago, all my degrees are from Mason. I have an undergraduate in computer science. Master’s in Applied IT, and a Master’s in Data Analytics Engineering. I was actually one of the first students in the program when it first started. I graduated from the program in 2017, and was recruited by Dr. Baldo in 2020 to be his assistant director. I’m also the capstone Coordinator, so after you’ve completed the 9 courses in your program. The 10th course is the capstone, and When you get angry at me… angry at all the work you have to do in the capstone, you can blame me for that. The idea behind the capstone course is to prepare students for real world. It’s… it’s not a… it’s a capstone course, it’s… it’s… that is unlike any other at the university. I… I solicit real-world data analytics projects from a number of, capstone partners. Last spring, we had 40 capstone, projects. This fall, we have 24, we’ll have another 24 this spring. And our partners range anywhere from, Pearman Sellers Winery in Northern Virginia to, Two of our partners are based out of Europe. Erasmus.ai, that developed ClimateGPT, is one of our partners, as is GaiaViz, who is based outside of Paris, France. So, we have a… variety of partners, both industry, academic, as well as non-profit that we work with. But the whole idea behind the capstone course is that you work on a real-world data analytics project. It’s very labor-intensive. It’s almost like a part-time job in that sense. But you gain a lot of valuable experience, as taking part of that, so… I’ll turn it over to you, Mary, then, as our third person here.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, hi everybody, I’m Mary Baldwin-Sloop. I’m the Graduate Academic Advisor for the Data Analytics Engineering Masters and the Data Analytics Certificate. Just so you know, I actually come more from a social sciences background. I work… my graduate degree is in linguistics, so language data, NLP, computational linguistics, that’s kind of my jam, the thing I love talking about. And I’ve been professionally working in student support for over a decade now, and have been working with this program for quite a while. And so I love working with students from all different backgrounds to kind of explore the diverse opportunities that are available within this program. And I’m kind of the person you go to when you’re like, I have no idea who to ask this question. You ask me that question, I help… I help you get an answer. I think we’re good to go on? Yeah.

George Mason Online Admissions: Dr. Baldo, do you want to talk about that?

Jim Baldo: Sure, sure. So, in terms of rankings, We have made it up to the… in 2023, we did… we did make it in the top 50 with, with online master’s engineering programs and U.S. News and World Report. That was quite an accomplishment, one of the things that I, would like to let you know is that when Professor Schmidt said he was one of the first, Students in the program. That was back… the program started back in 2014. And, we celebrated, last fall, our 10th year… our 10-year anniversary as a program. And, So, we’ve been getting a lot of, we’re getting a lot of, notice, but this one was really great to be rated this high on the, On the… the U.S. News & World Report. The… the way, we have things structured, as Professor Schmidt was mentioning, We have, we’re a multidisciplinary program. And this was a big push from the, the dean of the college, Dr. Ken Ball. We have since, around 2019, we became a college, the College of Engineering and Computing. And then we broke up into two schools, School of Engineering and the School of Computing. This program is in the School of Engineering, because we are very focused on doing, performing engineering-type activities. But, because we’re multidisciplinary, we… we cut across, both schools, all the departments, we cut across all the departments, so we have a very, very rich, number of… our course offering is very diverse, very large. We have over 100 courses to select from. Now. I do want to, because Mary will shout out here in a minute, we don’t have 100 courses to offer on the online program, and the reason for that is that the online program is asynchronous, and courses have to be, Transformed into an asynchronous format, as well as they are in session-based 8-week sessions, and they have to be condensed to fit into the time frame and into the fact that they’re asynchronous. But we do have a number of courses to offer online. And we also go outside of the College of Engineering and Computing. We have course offerings from the Business School, from our College of Health and Policy. And we continue to look for finding other areas where we can, you know, work with other colleges and schools within the university. So, it continues to evolve. And I think one of the things that you have to keep in mind with our program is that it is extremely diverse, and that you can tailor, your needs You can tell you your needs to… quite a few things. I mean, so we’re extremely… it’s extremely broad, and so it’s flexible for the… for the student. The other aspect here, too, that was touched on earlier. Was that because we cut across all these schools, we, we have access to a large number of world-class, researchers, within George Mason University. George Mason is the, largest university, largest public university in Virginia, and, We have… we’ve attracted some great faculty, in… in… in… in the past, and they’re still here with us, and so that’s… that’s a great advantage to learn. from some of the best folks in their fields. A member of the faculty, as Professor Schmidt had noted, including both Professor Schmidt and myself, we have industry experience. The other thing that we have here is our research centers. On campus. Within the college, we have, we have a number of research centers that actually work with industry and government. They actually go off and compete for contracts, and there are cases when we get pulled in To work on those as well. So, the faculty are not just folks doing basic research. In fact, Professor Schmidt and I are applied researchers. So I think that is a… that’s an important thing to note. When you consider us for a program. The online program also offers a graduate certificate option. Certificates, and this certificate is also under the umbrella. We are… our program is SHIB approved, so that’s a big plus for us, or for anyone getting a degree. That certificate is also under that umbrella of being SHIB approved. So we have, We’ve had a number of students who just… they want to come in, they want to take the four foundation courses, which is all… the four courses you have to take for the certificate. And, and that’s good enough. They just wanted to get some background, so they took the time to take the four courses. Which you could do in two semesters. But there’s always the option that if you can… if you want to pursue the degree, those four courses count, and you just move on, you register for the degree program, you know, you talk to Mary, and she’ll work out a schedule for you, and then you can… you can continue to move through. I, I think that, that type of a certificate is extremely valuable, and it also can be acquired in a short period of time. So, in some cases, people have found it as a career advantage, because on their resume, they’re able to put the certificate on. And also, some people use it that they’re not quite sure exactly, what they want to do. So, hey, they go after the certificate. And, you know, after they take the four courses, they can make the decision of, hey, I think the program’s for me, or no, I think I have enough, and this is good enough. But no pressure whatsoever. So it’s a nice option to have. Susan, why don’t we go to the next slide? K. So… I guess, Mary, do you want to take a cut at this, and then Professor Schmidt and I can chime in?

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, so I mean, we did talk a little bit about the program being established earlier on. Obviously, data is proliferating in so many venues, it needs to be analyzed, it can be used for so many goods, and our program’s very broad, so when we talk about the kind of places that our students go, it could be in healthcare, it could be in finance, you could be working for a tech company, and data is kind of undergirding everything. So, it was created, and Bernie and Jim, Dr. Baldo and Professor Schmidt can kind of expand on those goals, those professional goals. But there is a growing need right now to be able to take All of these massive data sets to make them useful for, you know, business decisions, for medical decisions, for, you know, risk assessments, for, you know, improving supply chains. And so, that’s why the program was designed to be interdisciplinary. That’s why it was designed to be flexible. That’s why we’ve tried to make it accessible, even if you are in Ghana, or if you are not physically able to come to campus, because we need, data analytics engineering professionals in this growing field. We’ve been working to implement and bring in more courses in deep learning, NLP, AI, the kind of modeling classes that are really undergirding a lot of this work right now, into the online program. We were talking about how there’s fewer courses than, like, the full 100 plus on the on-campus, but I do think that we’ve worked to get some of the most popular and most in-demand classes transferred to this online format to make it accessible. And in terms of industry Again, I think Dr. Baldwin and Professor Schmidt will be able to speak on this a bit more, but, It… it’s one of those things that’s constantly evolving, and that’s why, as Dr. Baldo said, we’re constantly adding more courses, we’re diversifying, we’re connecting with other departments, which means connecting with other skill sets, so that students can become blended engineers in this program and go out into a variety of fields. And job growth, specifically, I think, Dr. Baldo, when we were talking last, was it, systems, operations, kind of, positions that were growing a lot. You showed me some stats recently. I think that’s what I was noting.

Jim Baldo: Yeah, and so, the reason the three of us will talk to this slide here is that, when you come in contact with the advisor, such as, like, Mary, most people will talk about, you know, well, they’ll ask Mary, or they’ll ask Professor Schmidt or myself, you know. what’s the outlook from a job perspective, or what does this program offer that other programs don’t? And I’ll say a few words on that, but I wanted to have Professor Schmidt weigh in, because he actually Went through this program early on. And there was a reason why he decided to go after this. It wasn’t just that, hey, you know, I’m collecting degrees that I want to put on my wall. There was a real reason as to why he was interested in doing this, so I’m going to let him sort of give that, and this is all part of the driving forces. Mr.

Bernard Schmidt: Thank you, Dr. Baldo. Yeah, it’s interesting. I never actually was going after this degree. I already was a professor at Northern Virginia Community College, but one of the adjunct instructors who actually teaches in our program right now as well was teaching the first AIT580 course Which was, the introductory course you take, and… He invited me to participate in the course. He was doing data analytics for a three-letter intelligence agency and couldn’t tell me much about it. He was an instructor in my first master’s program, the applied IT, so he invited me to attend. And it was very fascinating. I found the AI T580 course back then absolutely fascinating. And, I was just gonna take another couple of courses just to see what it was all about, and next thing I know, I’m 6 courses into a 10-course program, and had to decide to, actually enroll in the program. I don’t recommend you wait that long, you’re supposed to enroll after 4 courses as a non-degree student, but I… the whole concept of data and data science resonated with me. In fact, there was Harvard Business Review back in, I think, 2012, Saying… said that data science was the, sexiest job that was out there, and it’s only grown. Dr. Baldo and Mary mentioned about artificial intelligence. When I was in the program, we were not permitted to take any AI courses, because they were only offered out of the computer science program, and they were restricted to computer science graduate and PhD students. Since that time, the Applied IT program has, created their own applied artificial intelligence courses, which our students can enroll in in the online program. But even more so, the capstone course is very much an applied course, and that is where we are unique in the university. In the last, you know, when large language models hit the scene a couple years ago, you know, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, Anthropic Claude. Mega Llama. They were a novelty at first, but then they started getting integrated into day-to-day operations, and that’s kind of where we are today. Out of the 24… capstone projects we have this semester, about half of them deal with artificial intelligence in some way. In fact, there are at least 5 capstones of… teams, 5 capstone teams, that are actually working with large language models right now. We have 4 teams working with Erasmus AI, who, as I said, is the creator of ClimateGPT, and Dr. Baldo is working with a team with another company, Capstone Company, that’s involved in that as well. In fact, actually, there’s another one I just… Thought about is, one of my teams. Is using a large language model to try to do… match resumes to job postings, to enhance a job seeker’s chances of matching more appropriate jobs from, say, jobs… from a job bank. So, it’s become a very, very, hot area to study, and you’re not going to find, courses typically in most universities that are even teaching those concepts. It’s so still new. And yet we’re able to incorporate them into our capstones, and that’s invaluable, from my perspective, as well as Dr. Baldo’s. perspective. In fact, Dr. Baldo is a driving force for having, for, for, working with me to, to include these new types of capstone projects into our curriculum. He’s been very, very supportive of that effort, so… and maybe you want to add on to that, Dr. Baldu, as well.

Jim Baldo: Now, so I wanted to ask… To have you understand, Professor Smith’s motivation to go into the program, and his is not uncommon. Okay, people have an interest, and also, and I wanted to have Mary say a few things as well, because Mary will pick up on these sort of things. And it’s important for her to understand that, as an advisor, to sort of help you make decisions on those… that big number of courses that you’re going to select from. So, I want to thank both of them for saying that. I’ll talk about the industry trends when I get… my industry trends when I get to, my slides. Professor Schmidt provided some… some what he said is spot on. I mean, we are… we cannot ignore these emerging technologies that are moving so fast. But I do want to talk about the background for the program and why it was created. When it was created, when the idea came up. the original director, Bob Osgood, sort of laid out this plan where he wanted to make this… there are other data analytics programs across the country that are specialized, like, in business, healthcare, social sciences. But he wanted to… he was thinking to make a unique program that was for the generalists, the general… the general data analytics engineering. And we put engineering on the end of that because we do deal with data, we do deal with analytics, and we do deal with the visualization. or producing the results that come out of our analytics. But we also, underneath all of this, we do some engineering. We have to worry about some of the things that Professor Schmidt was talking about. and, you know, when you talk to your… when you talk to the advisor, when you talk to Mary, there are certain courses that we take that are… that are very much engineering-based. So, the idea was to create a very unique program And as of today, I mean, when this program started about 11 years ago, there’s not really… I have been unable to find a program that’s similar, Data Analytics Engineering, that is a general, broadspread, multidisciplinary, broadspread program. So I think that is a really, really big advantage. It is not to say that, hey, you shouldn’t pick a program that does, finance, you shouldn’t pick, you know, or one that specializes in healthcare. Those are good. But the generalist, and it’s not a generalist because you don’t know exactly what you want to do. As a generalist, as Professor Schmidt had mentioned, there’s lots of different areas that you can practice in. So you could be on a team, and most data analytics engineering is team-based. So you could be on a team you could be on a couple of teams at one time, because when I practice, I am sometimes on a couple of teams. So you could be doing some healthcare analytics, you could be doing some financial analytics, you could be working in some very, very specialized, domain that’s somewhat limited, but you can go off and apply those general skills that you get from this program here. So, that was why it was created. And the background there was the need. To produce the generalist, the generalist data and analytics engineer. So the question, is there a need for this program, today, in today’s society? Absolutely. when I consult around the Washington, D.C. area, I’m sometimes on teams with my former students, which I just find… I’m ecstatic about that. And the need is the generalist Can view the broad spectrum of things that have to go on when you’re performing data analytics. Okay, so you can get involved with deploying the analytic, you could get involved with the actual tuning of the… tuning of a model, and as Professor Schmidt was talking about, you could get involved with coming up with innovative ways to use new emerging technologies, like LLMs. So, you’re… you can be very, very flexible. And lastly, what I will say is that with most engineering domains, and this one is no different, we are all lifelong learners. Professor Schmidt sort of hinted about that when he started in the program. There were… the classes were focused in… with technologies that were there. And now, over the years, over this decade of being in existence, the university has also adapted. New technologies into the program, as well as new analytics that may have emerged, or new visualization techniques that have emerged. So, Professor Schmidt had mentioned that in one of the capstones, he mentioned that he’s worked… he has a partner called Gaiavez, which is just outside of Paris. They do, 3D dimension, 3D visualization on a 2D platform. So basically, it looks sort of like a game engine. Where you can… you can plot your data under this 3D space, and you can move around. You can actually walk through the data, you can… you can look at it from the top, from the bottom, from the sides. You… you can slice things with it. It’s extremely cool. In fact, I was 3 or 4 years ago, I wanted to take the Unity game engine and use that to walk through my data, and here they had… they had already, built this. So it’s been really, really great to have a tool that’s there, that you don’t have to spend 2 years or 3 years trying to build out. It’s there. Okay. Susan, I guess we better… Start to move here, okay. And Mary, I’ll let you talk to this one.

Mary Baldwin: Quickly go over, so in terms of the curriculum, it’s a 10-course program for the master’s. 5 of those courses are our core courses. Four of them you’ll do at the beginning, AIT580, CS504, OR531, STAT515. That is your interdisciplinary introduction to different aspects of the field, from modeling and visualization, to, you know, data mining, some, cloud computing, all kinds of good stuff. The capstone is day in 690, that is the thing you do at the end, that’s that real-world project that builds on all the information that you get through the rest of your time. And I think the next slide has our concentration information, right? Alright… So, those 5 classes are your core interdisciplinary study and your capstone. Five of your courses will be your concentration. Now, in the fully online program, these are currently all the classes we have available. And so, it… you can’t do… we have 14 full concentrations on ground. But most of our students do an individualized path of study in the fully online program, just because it gives you the most flexibility, like we were talking about, flexibility, that’s the key word for this program, to pick and choose classes that will give you skill sets that are going to be useful for you in your particular career path. It is possible to do either our applied analytics concentration, which would consist of classes from those IST electives you see over there. Or potentially the business analytics,as well, that is another potential option. But most of my students do find they get the most in the online program of… by doing the individualized path of study. And you would work in consultation with… you get two supports in the online program. You get a success coach, and you have your advisor, which is me. And we would work together each term to kind of figure out what classes that are being offered fit your needs best. And that can range from marketing research to digital forensics, so stuff on cybercrime and, networking data, to issues of LLMs, or even decision and risk analysis. But yeah, lots of options that you can kind of leverage throughout your time. I think we can go on to the next one.

Jim Baldo: Okay, this is, some trends that I just want to briefly go over, for you. So, about… Three years ago, there became a, a shift. In terms of, we were… We were centralizing our data as, You know, back is… you know, I would say now, 15 years ago, when we started to migrate a lot of applications to the cloud. The cloud enabled us to, with cheap storage, enable us in centralization for access, to put a lot of data into the cloud and make it accessible, so it was cheap. We didn’t have to have… a business didn’t have to have a closet with a server in it and a bank of drives and things like that. Which was difficult. I mean, they had to upgrade… things would go wrong, you had to have an admin, things would break in the middle of the night, somebody would have to come in and log in and try and fix things, or worse yet, if they couldn’t get in, they’d have to drive in. So, with that movement, we started to create things that they called this data lake. And the data lakes were great, but they were also messy, and they became very, very difficult. So then we started to see these things called data… Data lake houses. And eventually what, what happened is people wanted to see something that they could consume But didn’t have to go into the data lake or the data lake house, to pull all that data out every time they wanted to do a project. So we started to build what were called data products. And this is still ongoing. Okay? And, Professor Schmidt and I are doing work in this area, in fact. We… I have a student in the program who I did some research, since graduated, did some research, with… in the fall of, 2024 through our DAN 698 course, that was there that Mary had up. That’s a research course that you can take from 1 to 3, 3 credit hours. But we did some work with data products for a particular domain that he’s involved with, and we have a follow-on contract to actually do some more work with him. But this data product is sort of interesting in the sense, is that it can be defined, so there’ll be a specification for it. And there’ll also be a contract. for it as well. And… and… And it’s… it has metadata that surrounds it, so it says this is what it can do. It has a quality infused into it. It also has some… some hooks in there for governance, like the privacy, the access controls. And… One of the really interesting things about this, this is that it’s built And it can be static, or it can be dynamic. So static is what you might be used to. You got… you might say, hey, Jim, I already have these CSV or these Excel spreadsheets. Are those data products? And I could say, yeah, they are. You probably store them on your file system locally, or they… or they sit central someplace, but, data products also come with… they’re attached to a catalog, or they’re referenced from a catalog, so they’re searchable. Okay. And, and also, they can be dynamic as well. So, you could have something, You could have a data product that actually refreshes itself. on a regular basis, okay? So there… it could be sitting there, connected to the data, and it might, in its contract, it says it refreshes itself every Every 15 minutes or so, or every 15 milliseconds, depending on What the refresh is going to be. what is needed from a refresh perspective. So, like, something like Apache Iceberg, if you’re, you know, that is used as a materialized view to keep that product, up to date. But the end user doesn’t have to worry about building that out. The producers of the product do that, okay? And so then somebody comes in, and a data scientist, somebody who does analytics. There’s AIML, there could be, you know, it could be an agent that comes in that wants to use it, or an LLM wants to use it. So, this is a trend that we see, it makes a lot of sense, it is evolving. One of the things with that contract is that that contract, from the specification, is usually written in something like what’s called a YAML file. And that’s executable. It could be executable, which means that somebody could Write a specification, have it map to a contract, push the button. And an application would actually build a data product on demand. So, that’s some of the basic applied research that we’re trying to do with our data products that we’re looking at for this particular domain. Okay, go to the next slide? And so, where does all this sit? I’m showing you an example of data mess architecture, but I don’t want to… I want to state up front that, These architectures, regardless of what they’re called, have different names. They come… this one particular data mesh architecture, is an abstraction, so you can… you can read about it, and then you build it out based on your needs. But the… the key ideas, the big idea here, if you If you unpack this ton of stuff that’s in the abstraction, is that you have the data product that’s in the center. And… There are end users who are going to be using that… that data product, and in order, you’re going to have a platform, and this… this architecture will be realized with a, A platform that will perform the governance. So that takes care of all of your privacy, your compliance, you know, your access controls and whatnot. And that’s handled in the platform automatically. And then you have this data platform team that performs things like the data ops on it. It makes sure that the data product itself is in the catalog so it can be discovered. So, an end user comes in, and they’re looking for something specific, and they type it… they type in, here, this is what I’m interested in. It could be a keyword search.

Jim Baldo: Or it could be front-ended by a chatbot or something like that. there’s all sorts of options, and all the storage and the querying and all that is all taken care of down at this platform. So we really see this… as the… the trend is seeing the data products, and then this is where the data products are going to sit. Now, they could be a different architectures, there’s no question about that, but clearly this is happening, and why is that? Because data continues to grow. at exponential rates. And in order to make data accessible. Across various different problem spaces, you really need to sort of catalog it, make sure that people understand it, you have some type of a specification that helps you understand what this is. Because in one domain, this data product could be in high demand, and it could be of high quality, but in another domain, because maybe it’s update rate, or maybe because of the precision of some of the type of data that’s in there, it could be of low quality, but still usable and accessible. Okay, we’ll go to the last slide here. And, the question came up with, how are data analytics engineers using AI? And I want to sort of extend this a little bit in a different way than, and expand upon what Professor Schmidt was trying to summarize earlier. What we’re seeing here in a trend in data analytics engineering is that AI is being applied And this is at a very, very high level, so this is the way that we… that, you know, one particular view of it. We see it being… AI being applied in the data pillar, or the oval here, the intelligence oval, the orchestration oval, and the delivery oval. Let me just say a little bit about all those. So, data… relational databases aren’t going away, nor are data warehouses, nor object stores. All of those things are going to be available. So, data is placed into those source systems. And how they’re placed in there, how schemas get generated, are there ontologies that need to go with it? Is it a graph database? Is it a vector database? Is it a NoSQL database? There are various design tools that, you know, help you out with how… how… what is the best way to store this, okay? Then the… the notion of catalogs, excuse me, catalogs and governance is critical. Governance requires policy. Policy has to be translated into something that is understandable by a machine or by a human being, and then you have to have enforcement mechanisms that are there. So that is all part of this AI wave that’s coming in, as well as with the, the catalogs. Understanding those policies, lineage is important, the pedigree of the data, all those things are critical. And then the… data platforms that process this data, so we take some of this raw data. We do… we are… trying to do this intelligently now. In some cases, we might, where before we would have a standard flow, where we would be doing this, this, you know, Python programs, for example, or C++ programs, and processing data. In some cases now, we might be able to stick an LLM in there. To do some of this processing for us. Not… maybe not all of it, but some of it. And… and of course. it does… it depends. I mean, in some cases, there’s privacy concerns, so we don’t want to use a commercial LLM, we want to use a local LLM, and all those things have to come into factor… into play. From an intelligence perspective, with our analytics, as Professor Schmidt had noted, we are using LLMs. There is no question about that. And the, And it’s sort of interesting because Professor Schmidt and I, in a lot of cases, when we’re working with teams, and you’re using an LLM, the prompt is really critical. And just… 12 months ago, people were talking… were still talking about prop engineering, and today that’s sort of… Prompt engineering isn’t the appropriate term, because it’s not… doesn’t really match what just the prompt is, so now we’re talking about context engineering. The prop is still there, we may have to make some changes to that, but the data that we might include in there, is important. If we include things like evaluation criteria, that’s important. So context, so now we’re looking at context engineering. And then retrieval augmented, generation, RAG, that is still a very, very important aspect. 12 months ago, I would say that we were seeing lots and lots of papers on this produced on a monthly basis. It’s waned a little bit, and the only reason for that is that other things have have caught the attention of this, of this very, very rapidly moving, wave. Agents are, Agent Egenic systems are clearly on the landscape today. People are using them, and, in our capstones today, the one capstone partner that we… one of our capstone partners that Professor Schmidt referenced. We have 4 project, teams, that are working on this, and what we’re doing is that their particular LLM that they built. needs to use external data to answer prompts that come from their customers. And so, we’re using the, message context, protocol, MCP, to, as a facade. that’s… that’s used so that the LLM can look and see what sort of particular types of, in this case here, data, but the tools that it has to offer, or the resources, or the prompts. And, then it makes a decision on whether it wants to use some of those tools or some of those resources to help it generate a response back to a prompt that it received from its front end. So those are, those are very, very important. Clearly, your, your, your knowledge of SQL is important, knowledge of a programming language like Python, We have some people now that are using Rust because of its performance capabilities. And then, of course, not to forget, safety evaluation and guardrails are really, really important. I want to go on to the orchestration, because this is a… this is one area that is really significant and continues to be very important. When I was mentioning that those data products can get updated. You have to be able to, allow That to occur, but also, as soon as you’re processing new information is coming in, you have to be able to, connect the dots, get that data in there, process it, so things like Apache Airflow, are… are important. Continuous integration, continuous development, that’s not just for software development, software engineering, that’s important for data analytics engineering. So, and Professor Schmidt has a lot of good experience in that type of work. This notion of, you know, XOPS, or so you have, MILOps, now we have LLM ops, we have data ops, monitoring that data, we’re monitoring the analytics that we’re… that we have, looking for things like drift is very, very important. And then, risk and compliance is crucial, especially when something goes into production. And, that compliance, especially, like, if you’re in healthcare, or in a lot of things where you have to protect, you know, privacy laws, I mean, laws, they could be local laws, they could be state laws, they could be at the federal level, or across countries. Okay, then we get to the delivery piece, and this is where it gets really, really interesting. That end user need something, and it could be just, you know, they need an auto-gen report that they’re going to read. Or they need some sort of a dynamic visualization that they want to go off and explore with to try to acquire insights, insights that might help them initiate some actionable things. So, I’m gonna… I’m gonna stop there, and the… the emphasis here that I was talking about is that AI is crucial. to data analytics today, especially data analytics engineers, and as Professor Schmidt was noting, we are using that. LLMs and agents are… are certainly two key things that we’re engaged with today, but there will be others as this… as this thing moves along. So with that, I think, Susan, I think we’ve maybe reached the end here?

George Mason Online Admissions: If you…

Mary Baldwin: If you want… Susan, do you want me to speak to this slide real quick? I know we’re almost out of time.

Jim Baldo: Sure, sure, go ahead.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, so just basically, in the online program, your courses primarily are going to be 8 weeks asynchronous. You’re going to have an online learning platform where there are going to be recorded lectures, you’ll be interacting with your materials through Canvas, and the only class that you’re going to have that’s going to be slightly different is that capstone. That’s going to be online, but synchronous. It’s going to last the full semester. I know someone in the Q&A asked about that. And so I did want to clarify, most classes, asynchronous, you know, working through those modules, and… but your final course will be synchronous with your class, your team, and your professor, but in an online format. And if you have more questions about details about that, please email me, after the meeting so I can answer those questions in more depth.

George Mason Online Admissions: Perfect, thank you. I have a quick question. So, being that it is online, what kind of interaction would you expect? Like, if you had any, you know, questions regarding the assignments, how does that work?

Jim Baldo: Sure, so I can talk to that. So I actually, have created one of the foundation courses that Mary was showing, the CS504, data management and mining. So I created the online course, and how that works, Susan, is a great question. It’s supposed to be asynchronous, so on one hand, Susan, if you were a student and you know, I don’t need to talk to the professor, I’m going to just, you know. The lectures… a lot of the lectures are videos by me or by other professors. And then there might be some reading, but there’ll be assignments, quizzes. All that is… and even projects, the CS504 is project-based. Students work in teams, but the professor doesn’t have to be engaged at all. Now, on the flip side of that. if you want to, work with the professor, or you have a question, you can reach out to the professor. We… we do, everything in Canvas, so you could send me a note. One of the things Professor Schmidt instituted for all of our courses, including our online, was we have, we created MS Teams channel. For the course. And, you can do, chats in there, and communication, and virtual, virtual sessions. So, I have a lot of students in the course, that say, hey, can we have a virtual session? There’s a particular problem I’m having with the assignment. And so we, you know, we go into MS Teams, the student shares out their screen, we look at it, we talk about it. And, and try to solve the problem or answer the question that the student has. A lot of back and forth with email, and sometimes if that… if the number of emails starts continuing, you know, it gets really, really large, I just say, hey, let’s just have a meeting like this, and let’s talk through it to save you some time. But that is sort of… those are the options, so that one extreme, you don’t have to. You never have to talk to the, the professor at all. The other extreme is you can be, you can communicate as much as… as you’d like with… with the online instructor. Some of the… some of the instructors, including me if I have a large course, I might have a, I might have a grader that would… that might grade some of the homework. But in, you know, for smaller courses, like, less than 20 or so, then usually the instructor does all the grading and all the interaction through the instructor.

George Mason Online Admissions: But thanks for… that was a good question. Hopefully that…

Jim Baldo: Answer some questions out there in the… in our audience.

George Mason Online Admissions: It does indeed. And, how long would you say that you have to devote to each class?

Jim Baldo: Per week, would you say? Oh, so I’m gonna say something, then I’ll let Professor Schmidt and Mary chime in as well. When we set the course up, when we set the online courses up. There was a, an estimate that we were given from, a Carnegie Mellon on online, and for our courses, they were… and they used some type of a formula. It was anywhere from… It could be anywhere from 10 to 15 hours. Per week. No. That might vary a little bit, depending on… we have, like, 8 modules. That might vary a little bit across the modules, and it depends on the course. It also depends, maybe, if one course is a little more difficult for a student versus another one, it might take a little more time. But that’s okay, I mean, I mean, there’s… there’s the enjoyment of mastering the material and learning it, so it’s worthwhile. But normally, between 10 and 15, that’s worth giving. But I would like Professor Schmidt and Mary to chime in on that as well.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, if I can jump in real quick, I think 10 to 15 is what I usually recommend for those 8-week accelerated online classes. And as Dr. Baller said, I think it does depend on your background. If you have a really strong programming background, maybe one class is easier for you. If you really are good with Excel, maybe OR531 will be easier for you, or it’ll be more challenging. So there’s some variation, just depending on that, but 10 to 15 is really solid for all your classes except the capstone, and I’m sure Professor Schmidt was wanting to talk about that. We do generally say 25 hours for the capstone. That’s the most intensive one. You’re going to be taking it by itself. It’s a team-based project, you’re working for a real client, and it’s your last one. It’s like the culmination of everything else you’ve done, so it is more time intensive, and so we get students ready for that in advance. But normal classes, 10 to 15, little bit of variation, and if you are finding that it is taking you substantially more time than that to get everything done. reach out to me. We talked about support from professors. If it’s a more overarching thing, and it’s not specific to a certain course, and you need help with study skills, or you’re just struggling, you can meet with me too. So that’s another, interaction and support you can have as you’re going through, but I… yeah, 10 to 15 is pretty good, except for the capstone. Professor Smith?

Bernard Schmidt: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so… once again, when we look at the capstone, it really depends on the type of project that you’re working with. We have Some capstones, which are traditional data analytics, you’re given a nice security data set, you’re asked to analyze and visualize the data, and those are the kinds of sort of things you, projects you would get in a regular, course. But then, as I mentioned before, we are also dealing with bleeding-edge and cutting-edge technologies, and, you know, technologies that you’re not going to be able to take a course for. And so, the idea behind the capstone is that it mimics real world. I mean, if you go into industry. you’re assigned to a project team, you don’t get to choose who you work with, you’re assigned to a project team. You’re assigned the project you’re given. So, it’s the same way in the capstone, and a good example is… the five courses I was, I was thinking about initially, every one of those project teams is working with MCP servers. Now, MCP servers, were, developed by, I think, what was Anthropic, Dr. Baldo, less than a year ago. And you’re… like I said, you’re… there is no academic course, at least at Mason, and certainly not in our program, that teaches you about that, so what you wind up doing is having to spend a lot of time outside the classroom… outside the classroom on the project. Researching these new technologies on your own. So that’s why you can get 20 to 25 hours a week on some of these more challenging capstones, but at the same time, you’re going to get exposed to new technologies that most other students don’t get at in a typical capstone course. So, you know, it varies, but yeah, that’s good. Think of the capstone as, like, a part-time job.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, and the hours per week is really relevant because we, the online program’s part-time only, and we do that because we have a lot of folks who have busy lives, they’re working full-time, and we want to make sure that that coursework is something that’s manageable, that you’re absorbing, that you’re getting everything you need out of, and that’s kind of why we do recommend the course ordering and stuff that we do, so that you’re able to fit that 10 to 15 hours, and then eventually that capstone experience into your schedule and really be successful in it.

George Mason Online Admissions: Great, thank you. Regarding the process? Do you want me to talk about that super quickly? Okay, perfect. So, actually, so you need your transcripts. Unofficials will do, as long as they show a degree conferral, and then once you’re accepted, then we will need official transcripts, a copy of your resume. I do believe now there’s two letters of reference that are required. Is that correct?

Mary Baldwin: For the master’s, yes. For the certificate, I don’t think there’s any letters of recommendation, that are required anymore.

George Mason Online Admissions: Perfect. And then the personal statement. If you’re not already working with an enrollment coordinator such as myself, feel free to reach out, and we would be happy to provide you with the application checklist, because there is, like, a guide for the personal statement. And, yeah, it’s pretty self-explanatory. I’m just gonna go ahead and forward. You can scan this in case you’re not talking… speaking with anybody. So, this is the number, the email, you can scan that if you’re not speaking with an enrollment coordinator, and, we’d be happy to help you. One wonderful thing, too, is that there are three starts a year. So, fall, spring, spring is… starts in January, despite the name, and then summer. So, Yep, and data is very hot, so…

Mary Baldwin: And we did have two questions in the Q&A, is it okay if I answer those real quick?

George Mason Online Admissions: Please.

Mary Baldwin: Yeah, so one of them, one of the students was just asking, hey, is the application for spring still open? Yes, it is. I don’t know if there’s a separate deadline for the online program, but on campus, it’s December 15th. Susan, do you know if there’s a separate one that y’all are still accepting?

George Mason Online Admissions: It’s… okay, so the deadline is the same. When you start the application, it’ll have you review the deadline. However, I really encourage you to apply as soon as possible. Here’s why. The school’s going to close for the holidays, so to give admissions sufficient time to look over your file. And it’s done on a rolling admission, so the sooner you apply, the sooner you get a decision. So, yeah.

Mary Baldwin: It’s never fun to do it last minute, right after the university closed for several weeks. Everything’s kind of slow, so the sooner the better, but yes, we still have time. And then also the other was, since it’s an online course, is it possible to switch to in-person down the road? So if you are in the area, and right now, for whatever reason, your schedule online program works best, but say in your last semester, or you’re a little bit further down the road, you do want to switch, that is possible. Just talk to me And we can… we can help you out with that. Usually, we say one-time switches are what we try and stick with, not, like, flip-flopping, and it’s usually because life circumstances have changed, or something’s gone on. So we’re, like I said, flexible. That’s the word that’s our key word. We work our best in any way we can to help students, so… yeah, just talk to me, and we can talk about that.

George Mason Online Admissions: So, it’s an amazing program, I can tell that y’all provide lots of support, and that’s wonderful. One last question, because I know we’re going over time. I’ve had students that are like, they don’t have that 3.0, and so, y’all do allow a GPA addendum, correct?

Jim Baldo: That is… that is correct. I… I think, before they do that, like, make sure you reach out to Susan. And, and discuss your situation, because Susan can reach out to, to Mary and… and discuss that in some more detail. But yes, we… it is not a, hard, fast… you know, it’s not a line, and if you fall below, you know, a micro-inch below the line, that we’re not going to look at you. We will look at you. So, but first, talk to Susan, and again, if there’s… more questions or something than… than Susan can bring in, you know, talk with Mary and… and myself and Professor Schmidt as well, if necessary. But, yeah, please, please consider us, and we are… we are here to, make you successful.

George Mason Online Admissions: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, for all this great information. And, oops, I think we’re done. I think we’re good with the questions. All right, we got them, everything.

Mary Baldwin: I think one last came in, but I’m gonna put my… the program email address again in the chat, datamine at jamu.edu. Please follow up, I’ll get back to you tomorrow, if any questions I can’t answer tonight, and we can chat, make appointments, to talk a little bit more in depth, one-on-one as well. Okay?

George Mason Online Admissions: Thank you again for everybody, everything, and, thank you, students, for joining us this evening.

Jim Baldo: Yeah, thanks. Thanks, folks. We really, really looking forward to seeing your applications, and, and I really thank you for, you know, giving us an opportunity to, describe and talk about the program, and meet us.

George Mason Online Admissions: Fantastic. Oh, there’s one more question. I saw the concentrations we could choose on GMU.

Mary Baldwin: Are they available? So, we talked about this a little bit earlier. In the fully online program, there’s a limited number of concentration electives, so most students do the individualized path of study, where you don’t pick one particular concentration. There are two that are possible, applied analytics and business analytics. So at the moment, those are the only two concentrations, full concentrations that are available in the online format, but often doing the individualized path of study allows you the most flexibility, and we can kind of chat, about, you know, what is the perfect kind of mixture of those concentration electives to kind of get the most out of the degree for you. But yeah, just those two right now, but a lot of students love the individualized, option.

Jim Baldo: Yeah, so I’d just like to add to what Mary… Mary said. Those… the two, concentrations that Mary, noted, those are two of our most popular concentrations on… on the, the, on-campus program. So, yeah, and as Mary said, we’re… we’re trying our best to get some… some more programs on, and maybe add another concentration.

George Mason Online Admissions: And the other thing, too, is if you’re local, you can start out online for that flexibility, and if you like a concentration that is on campus, you’re allowed that one-time switch, right?

Mary Baldwin: 100%. I have some students who’ll do that. They’ll take, like, heterogeneous data fusion, and they’ll be like, this is super cool! And I’m like, well, there’s more of these predictive analytics courses if you’re able to attend some of them in person. And so sometimes those can be good shifts, and you can get the most out of all those modalities that are available to you.

George Mason Online Admissions: Perfect. Well, thank you again for staying extra and staying over and answering all the great questions, and, thanks again, everyone, for joining us. Okay.

Mary Baldwin: Bye.

Jim Baldo: Take care, dogs.

George Mason Online Admissions: Thank you. Bye-bye.

Jim Baldo: Right.