Social Network For Analytic Professionals

Which course did you enjoy most at University?

Why did you like it better than other courses? In my case, I really liked stochastic geometry. It was quite theoretical, e.g. estimating the value of Pi by throwing a needle in a rectangular grid and counting how many times the needle hit one of the lines in the grid. But it had some nice applications too. One of the problems (known as the third Grenander Problem or Exterior/Interior Problem) consisted of estimating the shape of an oil field: about 20 oil wells had been digged, and we knew which ones had oil, which ones didn't. The only assumption was that the shape of the oil field was convex. We eventually developed a fast algorithm to compute a convex domain in any dimension (when dimension = 2 or 3, the problem is easy).

As you can imagine, the issue was trying to estimate the shape / extent of oil field with as few wells as possible, as digging wells outside the field is expensive.

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Permalink Reply by Osman on April 12, 2008 at 1:27pm: Computer Graphics, watched a lot of 3D graphics movies and short films :-) and progamming 3D graphics is always fun especially on silicon graphics workstations. one of my instructors went on to win a couple of academy awards for special effects for creature dynamics for work on movies including the new star war movies at Industrial Lights and Magic.

In business school corporate finance is eye opening. Once you start thinking in terms of present values.. well you are a different person... for better or worse.. I am not sure which..; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Sean Salleh on April 16, 2008 at 10:28am: A research course in computer science. I had a lot of freedom to read papers and investigate topics in computational geometry, theoretical computer science, and sensor networks. It allowed me to get my hands dirty...I was nostalgic for getting dirty and playing in mud, :); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Justin on April 16, 2008 at 10:55am: Its a toss up between Bioinformatics or Statistical Modeling.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Edmund Freeman on April 26, 2008 at 9:43pm: Statistical consulting.

We got clients from the rest of the university to work with, and the classwork was talking with professors about case studies. I found out about logistic regression just in time to apply it to survey analysis our clients wanted.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Sandro Saitta on April 28, 2008 at 8:49am: For me, it was a course on Neural Network. It was very interesting for me to see both training and testing error rates on the same plot and observe the effect of overfitting.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Navin Sinha on May 9, 2008 at 10:27pm: Quantitative Genetics, Design of Experiments and Applied Regression analysis were fun for me in Illinois. In MBA, Quantitative Market Research and Investment Risk Analysis (Finance) were quite fun. Having the scientific and quantitative background helped me more than learning the material in MBA; I just enjoyed like never before and mentored lot of colleagues...; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by AJAY OHRI on August 25, 2008 at 10:14pm: great question. brought back some good memories.

The courses we enjoyed are the ones that hurt the most at that time.

Quantitative Applications for Management. I got C's for first two trimesters, then got very angry (and slogged like crazy) and got an A in third trimester . This happened during my MBA at IIM Lucknow.

I loved strategy management, and drove the professor nuts. I read novels in class , but still scored the most,. He gave a 3 hour paper which he extended to 4 hours. I finshed it in 2.5 hours , just for fun (using some very fast and thus almost illegible handwriting).

Those were the good old days,
when we werent good,
we werent old,
and we were really not talking about the days.....; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by DataLLigence on September 18, 2008 at 4:46am: I loved the Quantitative Techniques classes. Marketing classes were also very interesting because of the professor and the Philip Kotler book!!!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Ian on October 12, 2008 at 7:25am: Like Ajay, I really enjoyed a Quantitative Applications for Management class taken at HEC Mtl.

I also had a blast in Market Research and analysis and other marketing oriented courses. I really feel like I'm on a quest to better understanding individual attitude, the masses and how they correlate.

I once attended an International Markets Dynamics class which had a great impact on how I view the world. My daily attitude towards people, economies and the environment has been heavily influenced by this experience. We went over the few resources that fuel the world economies (automobile, wheat and other crops, petroleum, chemical, etc.) and looked at their impact and ran up the globalisation timeline to its origins.; ▶ Reply to This