Faculty/Corporate Partnerships at Jindal Give Students Access to Latest Business Tech

Strong faculty/corporate partnerships are allowing students at the University of Texas at Dallas – Naveen Jindal School of Management the chance at hands-on experience with the latest business technology.

Across the fields of marketing, accounting, information technology and real estate, Jindal students are benefiting from strong connections between the university’s faculty members and their corporate connections. In the field of marketing, Jindal’s partnership with IBM—already proven successful after last year’s Morris Hite Center-IBM Marketing Customer Insights Competition—resulted in the distribution of 9,000 free licenses for IBM’s cloud-based data discovery tool. This in-kind grant, valued at $270,000, was the idea of Randy Messina, Worldwide Public Sector Manager of Watson Analytics.

“There are not enough data scientists or even everyday users who are able to make those key, day-to-day, data-driven decisions,” Messina said, explaining his thought behind the grant. With a five year license, he says, students will have access to the program throughout school and on into their workplace.

In the field of Information Technology and Management, use of the desktop data exploration platform from Tableau has been crucial for classes like Data Visualization and Business Data Warehousing. Thanks to the efforts of graduate student and president of the MIS Club, Sahil Ajmera, Tableau sent three representatives to an MIS Club event and offered tips and advice to the more than 120 students in attendance.

In the field of Real Estate, a partnership between faculty and the CCIM Institute, a real estate professional organization, has allowed students access to CCIM’s mapping and data platform—Site To Do Business—for free. “We need to have these tools available to them so that when they graduate…they’ve had exposure to some of these real-world tools,” said Georgia DeCourcy, associate director of Jindal’s real estate concentration.

Finally, in accounting, faculty member Jennifer Johnson is working with Intuit to transition her classes to using QuickBooks’ cloud-based accounting software. The school currently pays for desktop licenses, but with the cloud-based program installed, students will each receive a free one-year license.

regions: Dallas

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