In April, I graduated with a masters degree in Public Administration from Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business. You can find more information about the program at BYU MPA’s official website, but here’s a list of classes I took during my two years there with a short description for each class.
I had a great time studying at BYU. I’ve meet some wonderful people there, played intramural soccer and found a passion for programming.
Semester 1
1. Project Management
Basics of project management.
Concepts: Memorandum of Understanding; Scope of Work; Gantt chart; Project Management lifecycle: Plan, Control, Organize, Allocate Resources; Agile project management; Work breakdown structures; Estimating status of a project
2. Statitical Analysis
Basics of statistics, mainly using logistic and linear regression for data analysis.
Concepts: Validity of statistical analysis; Used R programming language for data analysis and visualization;
This course was supplemented by R courses on DataCamp.
3. Quantitative Decision Analysis
This class was designed to help students become better decision-makers through Excel modeling.
Concepts: Excel modeling: analytic hierarchy process; decision analysis scoring method; goal programming; linear programming; integer and non-linear programming; transportation assignment, and network models; forecasting
4. Organizational Behavior
The purpose of the class was to help students become effective managers and leaders.
I got the most out of this class by reading two books that were a part of this class: Crucial Conversations and The Zookeeper’s Secret (My professor, Dr. Thompson, wrote this book and it’s a great resource for finding purpose in life and work). Main concepts from The Zookeeper’s secret can be found in this talk that Dr. Thompson gave in 2010.
5. Administrative Environment
This class was about understanding the structure and workings of the US government. We read parts of the US Constitution and read papers that deal with certain aspects of management, politics, and law in the public sector.
6. Career Exploration
This class didn’t have any homework, I just had to attend it. Every Thursday, we would have alumni of our program come and talk about their careers. We had people from World Bank, city managers, financial and performance auditors, and non-profit managers.
7. Career Development
This class was about resume building and practicing interviews. It also involved contacting people and conducting informational interviews.
8. Communication in Public Administration
English grammar with focus on business writing. We learned how to write memos.
Semester 2
1. Spreadsheets for Business Analysis
Excel from basics to VBA:
i. Date and Time functions
ii. Working with names
iii. Charts
iv. External data acquisition
v. Conditional formatting
vi. Databases and lists
vii. Arrays
viii. Counting and summing
ix. Financial formulas
x. Megaformulas
xi. Basic Visual Basic Application
I took this class online, although there was an option to do it in the classroom. This was one of the most useful classes for gaining skills that are needed in almost every organization because so many organizations use Excel. At work, whenever there’s an Excel question people come to me. And I learned most of my Excel from this class.
2. Economic Decision Making for Managers
Basic economics with data analysis in R. Since the professor has a website for all his classes, you can access the whole course for free here. I learned a lot about programming from this professor.
3. Public Policy Process
The program for this class changed halfway through the semester so we went from writing memos on government policies of our choice to working with Utah County and help them chose a structure of government.
4. Intergovernmental Relations
Read texts and theories on relations between local, state, and federal governments and agencies.
5. Budgeting and Finance
Learned about balance sheets, municipal bonds, time value of money.
6. Public Program Evaluation
Learned about the structure and tools for program evaluation. We worked on a project with a government agency and helped them evaluate a program they were running.
One of the useful things that I’ve learned and can be applied to check if someone is lying when using data to corroborate their claims. It’s called threats to statistical conclusion validity and here’s the list:
i. Low statistical power
ii. Violated assumptions of the test statistics
iii. Fishing and the error rate problem
iv. Unreliability of measures
v. Restriction of range
vi. Unreliability of treatment implementation
vii. Extraneous variance in the experimental setting
viii. Heterogeneity of units
ix. Inaccurate effect size estimation
It’s worth looking up these terms.
7. Negotiations
Learned basics of negotiating and did some role playing.
Semester 3
1. Advanced Data Analytics
In this class, I learned basic and advanced machine learning models. The professor used fun data sets like Titanic passengers. Based on several features of each passengers (age, gender, economic status, and others) we had to predict which passengers survived or not.
Here’s a list of all machine learning models I learned in this class:
i. Cluster analysis
ii. Linear Regression
iii. Decisions trees
iv. Using Python programming language
v. CART: Classification and regression trees
vi. MLR: Multiple linear regression
vii. Time series forecasting
viii. Categorical prediction model evaluation
ix. Logistic regression
x. K-Nearest neighbors
xi. Artificial Neural Networks
xii. Gradient Boosting
xiii. Random forests
xiv. Cluster Analysis and Subpopulations
xv. SVM: Support Vector Machines and Profit Analysis
xvi. Data management and sampling
2. Cost-Benefit Analysis
Learned some basic formulas and concepts for cost-benefit analysis. Worked on a project with an airport, helped them decide how they’ll fund the airport.
3. Data Science for Managers
This class covers data analysis in R and I loved it. The professor was an experienced statistician and programmer and I learned a lot. He used an open-source book R for Data Science written by great Hadley Wickham.
4. Grantwell
This class was about non-profit funding and management. Although I wasn’t interested in non-profits, I took this class to help a friend manage a project with one of the partners.
5. Ethics for Management
Read on various ethics theories. Wrote a personal code of ethics.
6. Legal Issues in Public Administration
Basics of legal analysis. We would read a case before each class, and then the professor would randomly call someone to present the facts of the case and analyze it.
Semester 4
1. Spreadsheet Automation
This class was about writing macros in Excel and automating tasks. This was one of my favorite classes in the program, and I learned a lot about programming in Visual Basic Application. The professor has a website for this class, and you can access it here.
2. Human Resource Management
Covered following topics: negotiating salary; calculated retirement savings; legally and ethically managing diversity within organizations; gender discrimination.
3. Leadership in Public Administration
This was a class where I worked on my capstone project. My capstone project was outlining a plan to redesign a website for my employer.