Summer is over. Project season has finished and students are back in coursework. Weekly meetings, phonecalls and reports are in the past now, and attention is focused on readings and assignments. Days are getting chillier and leaves starting to fall. Meanwhile a new class of students is beginning the MMOR program. They are eager to learn and to discover the challenges they’ll face in the program. A new cycle begins. In order to recycle some knowledge, we proposed them to have a chat with an ‘old’ students about the main challenges they faced in the program. Here are some of the stories that came back with. 

MMOR Experience and Advice, by Nathan

I got the chance to sit down with Siamak to talk about his experience in the MMOR program over the past year. Siamak has an MSc in Mechanical Engineering and has approximately 5 years work experience prior to him beginning the MMOR program. He decided to make the transition to an OR-related career because of changing interests, as well as wanting to be involved in a unique and in-demand field of work.

When I asked Siamak about the biggest challenge he has faced in the program so far, he began talking about the program’s workload. Having done a master’s program in the past, Siamak is no stranger to heavy academic commitment, but he highlighted that this program has its workload condensed into a shorter period of time, making it more challenging to complete various weekly assignments. He stated that the first period of the program was the most difficult to get used to, especially because of the stochastic processes course (BAMS 501). Although he has studied the concepts years before, the pace of the course was very quick for someone who is relearning the main concepts. To counter this problem, Siamak explained that he focused more of his time on this course to make sure he didn’t fall behind with the course content.

I also asked Siamak if he had any advice for the new MMOR class. Firstly, he simply said “survive”. Although maybe a bit of an over-statement, he highlighted the importance of trying to manage the workload. Secondly, he explained how useful the programming component of the MMOR program has been. He highlights that particularly VBA, SQL, and R were used in most of the projects the students completed over the past summer, so getting a solid foundation in these languages throughout the coursework portion of the program will help students when they dive into their project work. Lastly, Siamak mentioned that sometimes projects may hit road blocks or dead-ends, and that students may need to re-chart their course of action. He explained that this “trial and error” process is expected throughout the project season, and to not let that stand in the way of success.

Thank you Siamak for your time and your thoughts! I have a good feeling that this advice will help our class!

Ziqian

The undergraduate majors of Laura and me are Mathematics. So I thought the problem she met I would probably meet in the program. She told me the challenges I would meet in detail.

First of all, because mathematics students learn little about coding, the coding may be one of the biggest challenges for us. She thinks that coding is also a challenge for other students. To overcome this challenge, she suggested that we should practice a lot. What is more, asking classmates and teachers for help is a good way to overcome some difficulty we met. And once we meet problems, we are supposed to keep patient and not to give up.

Secondly, though both of us are mathematics students, I learnt less knowledge of probability than her. She suggested me to prepare lessons before class. In this way, I can pick up the probability quickly.

Moreover, as English is my second language, it may be another of my biggest challenge. She encouraged me  to practicing English by communicating with native English speakers in the real world. It will be good practice.

Last but not least, we talked about the project. She said that the project is different from other classes. We will work with partners and get the suggestions from the staff. It will lay a solid foundation for our future. There will be some sometimes in the project we will be stressed. But it is a long project session. So she said that planning ahead is key.
Anyway, keep calm and carry on.

Odette

Yao (Susie) started the MMOR program in 2014. She is originally from China and studied business at Purdue for her undergraduate degree, before coming directly to UBC to study in the MMOR program. Susie says the biggest challenge in the program was managing change. Because her undergrad was in business, the math content was a big learning curve. This came simultaneously with the challenges of moving to a new city and adapting to a new university.

To deal with the challenge of learning a lot of new material in a short period, she said she had to adapt quickly to the new type of workload. Being able to absorb a large amount of information and understand it for future reference was helpful. Even if she couldn’t learn everything very quickly or immediately, the most important part was being able to fully understand the information and put that knowledge into practice later on, especially in the industry project. Looking back at what she learned in class helped substantially for the project.

Other advice Susie has is to take care of health and wellness; as the program is compact it is important to be healthy. She says it’s important to work on time management and organizational skills, especially second semester when there is a lot of group work to coordinate. Tools like google sheets and calendars can be helpful for coordinating group work and assignments. Teamwork is also a very important skill to work on during the MMOR program; working well with classmates is essential both for group assignments and the industry project.

Deepak

I met Frank to understand more about his work and his experiences with the MMOR program. Frank is a mechanical engineer who, previous to the MMOR program, worked in the area of reliability engineering with Cummins. His work involved understanding the durability of Cummin’s technology, by means of intensive testing and obtaining feedback. His desire to build more upon his knowledge brought him to the COE to study operations research.

Frank worked on a data mining project, for an airline company, wherein he used data mining tools to derive value from data obtained from social media communications. He felt that the project was very exciting because he had to learn a lot of techniques (including programming) from scratch, which was a challenge that he was ready for. The requirements of the company changed from time to time, but Frank and his team adapted well to accommodate their changing needs. Frank felt he was able to do well because of a good team, supportive classmates, helpful mentors who knew the scope and breadth of the problem.

Frank was indeed happy to be part of the MMOR cohort and felt that through the program, he learnt what he expected. Initially, His biggest challenges were the high paced courses and the preliminary challenges of the project, where he had to get up to speed to do quality work. His advice to the our cohort as well as future MMOR students is to be sufficiently prepared, may it be class assignments, homework, tests or project work and build excellent skillsets that make you unique. He signed off saying that the most important thing to remember is how to manage your time effectively, between the intensive academic load and project work.

An interview with Haider, by Nayef

Haider strikes me as a very talented and level-headed person. When I asked him what he found most challenging about the MMOR program, he mentioned neither the coursework nor the industry project, but the fact that he was away from his friends and family Pakistan. He assured me that as long as one completes the assignments as soon as possible and spends about two hours a day studying, the workload of the program should be manageable (I hope that any of our instructors reading this do not take this as a direct challenge). Among the tips that he gave me regarding the challenge of finding community as an international student were that it helps to live on campus, and find hobbies to involve oneself in (he plays in a football league). He also noted that it is important to have good relationships with every individual in your MMOR cohort, and to remain positive even through stressful times, as this allows everyone to work better together and achieve more.

Before joining the MMOR program, Haider studied economics and computer science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He began his industry project in April 2015, working with a forestry company on forecasting demand and running pricing simulations. His team created regression and clustering models, using R and Tableau. The courses he mentioned as being most useful for preparing him for the industry project were those on optimization, simulation, and statistical programming with R. Haider is currently taking electives in machine learning, risk management, and database mining. He aims to get a job in programming or technical consulting after completing the MMOR program. Haider, if you’re reading this, thanks for all the advice, and I hope we have more opportunities to meet up!

Will

Ben received his B.Sc in Mathematics from Central Washington University. He researched possible career paths and chose Operations Research because of its broad applications across many fields. He chose the Sauder MMOR program because of its unique structure which includes a five month industry project.

The most challenging part of the program for Ben was the heavy reliance on computer programming. Ben’s background (other than throwing fish at Pike Place Market in Seattle) is in math, mainly real analysis and statistics. He was familiar with many of the concepts in stochastics and probability and felt confident exploring rigorous mathematical theorems and proofs. However, the application and implementation of these concepts in R, VBA, GAMS and other languages was entirely new.

In order to overcome the steep learning curve, Ben relied on his classmates. One of the unique aspect of the MMOR program is a class made up of a cross disciplinary group of business, math, finance, economics, and engineering majors who each bring a unique set of skills.  Ben’s fluency in probability was an asset to his cohort and he was able to collaborate with others in the group to improve his programming skills. Unlike some business programs where the objective is to be ranked above others in your class, the emphasis here, in his opinion, is to work together to achieve more than you can individually.

A few pieces of parting advice from Ben: do the readings. Don’t let it overwhelm you. This isn’t the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Schedule in breaks and keep a healthy perspective on the work load. This is only a starting point; it is a foundation on which to pursue a career in OR. As much as the last year has been about models and Markov chains, it has also has been about increasing your capacity to learn.  Picking up new skills quickly – like we all have to do in each five week class period – will be essential when it comes to finding a job or starting your own business in the future.

Alex (MMOR’15)

I think what I gained from the projects and the courses was a deeper understanding and practice of OR/Analtics tools and methods, so my advice won’t be tied to any particular learning moments from MMOR. However I did apply these lessons (I think successfully) throughout the program. I also think these lessons will be ones that are hard-learned for some of the more technically oriented new students:

1. Academic novelty != client value.

1.5 Academic precision/significance != business precision/significance.

2. A bad idea communicated well is more likely to be implemented than a good idea communicated poorly.

3. Visuals > words.

4. Aesthetics and attention to detail = client perception of quality and value.

5. Words matter, colours matter, shapes matter, alignment/spacing matter.

Nina

Siamak is a current student of Master of Management in Operation Research at Sauder School, UBC. He has fulfilled all the first year courses and has recently finished his project. Before joining the program, his background was in Mechanical Engineering.

As he mentions his biggest challenge was with the courses offered in the first quarter, specifically with Probabilistic Models for Management and Statistical Methodology. All his knowledge in these two courses backed to his undergraduate study.

Initially he found himself a bit overwhelmed by the level of difficulty of the courses especially in the first two weeks. His undergrad background was not enough to understand well the materials. But to his credit, he did not give up, he believed in himself and knew he is able to accomplish these courses with his strong engineering and analytical background.

To solve his problem, he started reviewing the undergrad courses related to probability and statistics. Then he went through the text book introduced by the course instructor. And finally by solving the assignments, he built and improved his confidence in these two courses.

“Try not to fall behind the class, then you will have a hard time catching up with it. If you loss one week, you will loss the rest of the course”, He emphasizes. His suggestions for the new students are to review their statistics and probability knowledge before starting the program, read the text book and the lecture notes before and after each session and do the assignments in group. Discussing the assignments in group helps students to learn more and better understand the concepts.

Lexie

The sharing knowledge activity really gives me a great opportunity to get to know challenges that I might have to face for the next few months. The student that I have approached individually is Frank, who graduated from Purdue University with a mechanical engineering B.S. “MMOR is a really challenging program. You should always keep that in mind. ” said Frank. Teamwork, presentation skill, coding ability and language proficiency are all equally significant from what he said.

One key word that he kept mentioning (and also the word impressed me most) is time management. As it is known to all, life at MMOR is moving at such a fast pace that we have to fasten our seat belts or we could easily get off track. If we cannot learn to multitask in many cases, we would probably feel overwhelmed. An excellent way to manage time is we should do concentrate on what we should do and get them done one by one, step by step while refraining from doing something meaningless.

Another challenge that I will bump into is that some knowledge could be brand-new to me since my undergraduate major isn’t operations research or math. This means that I have to make an extra effort to teach myself so as to make up what I lack. “But if one had already learned everything before, it is unnecessary for him to come to MMOR, or any graduate programs.” said Frank, “After all, life is about nothing but challenges.” I guess he is right. I believe after sixteen months of hard work, I will celebrate myself and my everyday growth and progress.

Ryan

Taking the advantage of Friday’s gathering, I asked several students about the topic that what has been the biggest challenge you have faced in the program. Here, I will mainly focus on one student’s opinions, Frank, and talk about it.

It was a great gathering on Friday. Franks was the first last year students that I talked to. He was nice and friendly. During the talking I knew that Franks is from China as well. He studied his undergraduate degree in the USA. As an engineer, he is very sensitive and strong in mathematics which is a good foundation for our program. His English is pretty good that you would not think he is a non-native English speaker.

So during our talk Frank told me that the biggest challenge he ever met so far in the program is the simulation course. No even him, even some other student from last year like Hans, and Benjamin agreed with that as well. The reasons why Frank thought the simulation course is the biggest challenge are: first, the course itself is a difficult course. You have to put a lot of effort on it. Also, the new software they used last year was hard to interface. The last but not the least, simulation is not like coding, students could not just google what they want and get multiple answers or help from the internet.

However, Frank told me that do not need to worry too much. He said that the best way to get through this course is to do more practice. After all, hard work pays at last.

Pei Jia

The course setting in MMOR is very intense. Most of the courses are ended in about five weeks, so how to master the knowledge of several courses well in such a short time is so challenging, especially if you don’t familiar with the contents and details.

If your background was in mathematics or computer science, it would be much better, since OR includes the use of  many kinds of software and mathematical problems. Nevertheless, if your background was not in the related areas, such as business and economics, it would take you a lot of time to catch up. In addition, everyone needs to have time management skills, or you will stay up late at night every day to struggle with searching information for the new materials that you  don’t really understand, doing large amount of assignments and reviewing the courses for exams. The industry project requires us to have practical working skills and conversation skills with clients.

Although it is challenging to study in OR program, it deserves to put efforts in. Even if your background was not in the related areas, as long as you study hard, your efforts will be rewarded in time. Within two weeks, you will get used to the teaching style and fast pace. Professors and teaching assistants are willing to answer you any kinds of questions about the courses. The classmates are warm-hearted to explain to you the problems you don’t really understand. Try to make adjustments when pressure comes. In the end, you will find OR is a fantastic program.