My name is John Gordon. My story is originally from Pennsylvania. I served the military for twelve years. Near the end of my military career, I got a lot of computer training, ended up as a system administrator. And, I studied computer science at Weaver State University. When I got out of the military. After that, I started consulting with some Non-profit organizations in Salt Lake City. I also worked with some government agencies and some commercial businesses. I've been in the industry for thirty years. Pretty much everything that I've done has been related to data in some way. I have been a database administrator and, a developer and data analyst, which is largely what I do today, senior data analyst with a national property management company. The MSBA program is kind of a logical progression of work that I've done and looking forward to applying the skills that I am learning there in my future work as well.

The courses in the MSBA program are kind of heavily weighted in data analysis, modeling and statistics. We have used R programming language in projects so far. I mean, I'm in my first semester, so, so far, that's what we've been working with. Interesting thing, one of the things that i really like is that they used data camp as kind of a filler for any areas that you might feel some weakness in. I've worked with R before, but not at the depths, especially on statistical areas that we use it in the classes. So the data camp course, in conjunction with the course work has been very useful. With my development background, I am particularly interested in using R to conduct data analysis and to see you know what, what I can use that for and the new algorithms that I'm learning us well. The time commitment, I guess, for a full time student, would be about ten hours of week in class. And of course, general would be to double that time for your studying and preparing projects and for tests and such. I think that the tests and the projects so far been very fair and very informative and interesting and match up with the coursework and the goals of the courses that I've been in so far.

I enrolled in the MSBA program at the University of Utah for a number of reasons. One of the things that I did was to review the research interests of the faculty, some of the backgrounds they have. I'm also interested in attending primarily in-class. There's a lot of online programs available today and and while those are very beneficial, my personal preference is to be in a classroom, being able to interact with the professors and the other students. And so and I'm finding that to be very helpful, coming back to school, you know, after being out for a while. I also like the fact that the University of Utah Business School is very supportive of veteran students. As a veteran, you know, there's experience that we have in the University of Utah. It has great veteran support center and the business school has veteran ambassador. It is the role that I'm filling right now as well. I did look at other schools, and I'm largely committed to being in Utah so pretty much all the other schools would have been online and while many of them are very, very good, and you can find very easily. Find a list of those, it's a couple of simple searches. I did find that University of Utah's program is rated in the top ten in the country. And so that was a very important thing for me as well. Because it demonstrates that even though it's a fairly young program, they're making great progress and building a really good curriculum.