Grad school desires vs. real-world demands

I was recently promoted from “associate professor” to “professor.” There were two notable things about this promotion:

• This is the first time in my life that I had ever received a formal promotion from an existing employer (all other job title changes have been the result of changing employers).
  
  
• I am now officially no longer a “junior” faculty member, a fact confirmed by the impending arrival of my 50th birthday later this year.”

Anyway, a few weeks after being notified of my promotion, I flew off to Minnesota to visit St. Olaf College, my undergraduate alma mater. While my primary purpose in going was to attend a meeting of the school’s Alumni Board, the real highlight was the chance to meet with current St. Olaf students, to have a chance to see the world through their eyes, and to offer up any relevant wisdom gleaned from my own experience.

The first St. Olaf student I met with was a senior math major, a bright young man who had until recently been planning to pursue a Ph.D. in economics. He was now set on further studies in operations research, and he was trying to decide where to go to grad school.

I winced.

The second student was a young woman in her junior year who was majoring in mathematics and biology with a concentration in statistics. She had seized the opportunity to visit with me, in large part because she had just begun to explore graduate programs in O.R.

I tried to talk her out of it.

Bear in mind that some years ago, I had been in the same place that these current St. Olaf students now were. Blessed with a lot of good choices, I had chosen to go forth to study operations research. In fact, so too did my college classmates Hai Chu and Karen Donohue, and I am grateful to have had the chance to bask in their (reflected) professional success in operations research.

So why would I advise these youngsters not to follow in our glorious footsteps? Let’s start with some important specifics. First of all, for both of these students, the decision to go to graduate school seemed to serve many purposes: an opportunity to challenge themselves; a chance to improve prospects for both financially and intellectually rewarding careers; and a socially acceptable path with parents, peers and professors.

Also, from our conversations, it appeared that both had been initially attracted to operations research by my friend Steve McKelvey, a professor who has been inspiring Olaf math majors since my own student days. Finally, it was quickly apparent to me that the primary motivation was the chance to meaningfully apply their (current and future) skills, rather than any particular passion for O.R. itself.

Graduate programs in operations research certainly have many virtues, and I will always be deeply indebted to the one that took me in. There will always be some for whom this is a clear and obvious right next step, students who are passionate about the methods and hungry to learn more about them. Yet for the generally quantitatively strong undergraduate who is interested in applying her technical skills within the business world, my post-collegiate recommendations are based on a few simple premises:

1. The business world is increasingly data-rich, but one must have the ability to sort that data out before any of this analysis can take place. This means getting comfortable with programming and data preparation, which we know typically takes up more than 50 percent of the time on most “real-world” projects.
   
   
2. Optimization is great, but really good answers quickly are actually better, especially if the environment is rapidly changing or the objective itself lacks a well-defined functional form.
   
   
3. You often can’t optimize a system without first predicting future demand, and that forecasting is itself a significant challenge.
   
   
4. You are unlikely to do any of this great work totally on your own, so developing the skills needed to work effectively with others is too important to be left to chance.

With all this as background, I suggested ?that the students pursue one of the following:

• An M.S. degree in analytics that focuses on preparing students for effectively working across the analytics project cycle, which in addition to content found in traditional O.R. programs also includes training in problem discovery and framing, data capture, preparation and analysis, predictive modeling, business communication, teamwork and project skills.
  
  
• A Ph.D. program in an academic area of interest (economics, biology, physics and psychology were all discussed), which would include additional rigorous technical training, require them to combine the experience of acquiring deep domain knowledge with challenges in data acquisition and analysis, and help them to more deeply develop their ability to learn independently while working in collaboration with an advisor ?(and ideally as part of a research group).

The second St. Olaf student I met, who is still more than a year from graduating, agreed to give our conversation some serious thought. I was pleased that she had at least listened to what I had to say. However, for the first student, just weeks from commencement, the die is cast. He’s going to Cornell to study O.R.

Kids today! What can you do?