MS&E 352

Professional Decision Analysis

This class fully immerses you in the world of Decision Analysis. Students will work on real-world case studies every two weeks and delve deep into the full DA cycle. Students will also learn about the soft skills necessary to help people and organizations make decisions, through extant research in behavior sciences. Knowledge of calculus is a prerequisite. Available online. (Winter Quarter)

Click here for a sample course syllabus from a previous year.

You can see the videos of problem sessions from 2010 here.

Join our linkedin alumni by clicking here.

Some testimonials from past students:

"DA1 was a great introduction to the basics of effectively incorporating uncertainty into decision making, but it did not quite leave me with the level of mastery I felt I needed to apply the concepts to real life business problems. While DA1 was an intro to theory and science, DA2 was very much rolling my sleeves up, digging into a business problem to understand the uncertainties and decisions being made, and then building complex Excel models capturing those details to inform the decisions.  This experience practice was extremely valuable in preparing me for my time at McKinsey as a management consultant and at Google as part of their Business Operations and Strategy team.  The strong understanding of uncertainty and decision analysis principles I obtained has been useful in tackling many business problems and the detailed scenario modeling skills I learned have been put to use many, many times.

I would highly, highly recommend taking DA2." - Casimir Starsiak, Google, 2008 DA graduate

"DA1 was a great class to help me understand decision theory and risk analysis, but I wanted to see how I could apply these concept to real problems. In DA2 I got a chance to tackle problems and apply my DA1 learnings in an intimate class setting. Much of what I learned in DA2 was useful for me in my day-to-day work setting, but I would say my biggest takeaways were creating complex Excel models and framing large problems into structured pieces. I would definitely recommend DA2 to all DA1 students!" - Mitra Mahdavian, Major Consulting Firm, 2009 DA graduate