Graduate / Draft Academic Statement of Purpose for School of Information Univ. of Michigan [4]

Essay question:
Please discuss the following questions based on your exploration of the UMSI website, as well as your own reflection on your academic abilities, experiences, and personal qualities. You are welcome to add comments from your readings, observations, and experience. Your essay should be four to six pages (4-6), double-spaced. At the University of Michigan School of Information, we highly value academic integrity. Please be sure that any essay content that is not your own original thoughts is properly attributed.

MY ANSWER:

University of Michigan School of Information SOP

What most businesses want is to get higher profit, more sales rate, and more satisfied customer. One thing they can do to make the goals is by learning from past experience, by using past data from previous transaction, or by capturing and analyzing what customers are saying in a review page or in social media. Even a marketing strategy can be led by people's interaction or the history of people's browsing activity. What a business needed is an informative and insightful information about the collected data. To develop a new strategy, managers or people who is sitting in strategic level need to know about the company's current condition, exactly they do not need a raw collection of transaction data, but they prefer to see the visualization, readable and easy to understand information. Data has a power, but it will be more usable if it can be delivered in such interesting form that gives insightful information. A term that is currently popular to mention the technique to digging and analyzing data called data analytics or data science. Data science or sometimes people also called data analytics, currently not just used by business and industry which is much concern on profit and customer, the implementation now becomes wider to healthcare, medical, government and agriculture. For instance, one of the biggest data science provider company in my home country has been successfully implementing a data science and analytics based application for agriculture. The company builds a mobile application that has capability to use historical farming data to give recommendation to the farmers and also use satellite to gather weather data. In fact, the result is spectacular, it increases 80% of farming production (according to databot.io). As an agricultural country the solution will be very helpful and really needed by my home country, especially to improving crop production and cutting the amount of imported food sources. In healthcare industry, the implementation of data analytics is various from healthcare management to healthcare treatment. Some findings mentioned that data analysis currently help healthcare industries to be more economic by reducing cost and using effective number of human resources. One example of the implementation is how data analysis can predict the number of patients who will come to hospitals in daily, even hourly basis, so the manager can make best decision on how many staff will be allocated at that particular time. Moreover data analytics also can help government to increase their service and reducing risk in performing day-to-day service delivery to the society. It also can be used to increase national income in some specific sectors, such as in tourism sector. Indonesian government in fact is already implementing interactive dashboard to show which places are mostly visited by tourists, the visualization then, can be used to predict and attract the number of tourist visitor in Indonesia.

Big company like SAP also aware with the current data analytics issue and don't want to lost the opportunity to offer their solution in analytics term. When I was attending a workshop about ERP cloud technology several weeks ago, surprisingly there is a session about SAP Cloud Analytics, which is actually out of the agenda. The session delivered in the late evening, in the end of the training, just 15 minutes introduction about the analytics software. With the limited time given, the out of topic session hardly tried to show at glance about the analytics software and how it can help business. Indirectly it proves that today, analytics is a hot issue in information and information technology area.

As discussed before, one other important thing is how we can visualize the data into a better, read-able and easy-understand form. At this phase, analyzed data should be presented in appropriate format, so the manager, decision maker, or people in strategy level will easily get the information or insight that want to be delivered. I realize the importance of the visualization when I was involved in an SAP implementation project. There was an SAP module called analytics, this module accommodated creation of reports as well as dashboards. Request from client mainly on dashboard which can show some reports in a single view. The managers not only need to know about what happen on the sales trend within a year, but also want to know which product with the largest number of sales as well as products with the lowest on the selected month within the year. Not only what report should be presented, but also the choice of graph type. What kind of graph we choose to show sales trend is should be different from graph which is used to presenting the number of sales product. More specifically the chosen color will develop people interpretation, green means good progress, while red mostly interpreting something bad, a failure, or critical area which need to be noticed. Visualizing data cannot be underestimated, bad and inappropriate visualization will led to wrong interpretation, which can further ended with wrong decision. Capability on design thinking actually needed to make a good data visualization.

With the increase of online transaction and people interaction using online media in my home country, Indonesia, the opportunity in analytics and data science area are also growing. Many industry needs data analysis implementation, e-commerce, telecom, and banking industry are the most common industry that currently show their progress and interest in data analysis, business analytics, marketing analytics, and other analytics related areas. Many companies offering analytics job in various name, sometimes they mention data scientist and in other companies it usually called analyst or data analyst. Unfortunately the high demand on data analysis personnel is not balanced by the supply of competence human resource in that area. Based on article from techinasia.id (id.techinasia/talk/profesi-data-scientistmenjanjikan), Indonesia still needs many data scientists, not only in big company such as FMCG and telecommunication company, but also in start-up company. According to my experience when applying data analytics job, I mostly rejected because I did not have strong knowledge on data analysis and data science. Although I have got some courses related to data and its related area, such as data mining, but the course in fact not enough accommodate deep knowledge and technique on data science and analysis. The role of data analyst or data scientist is like a hybrid, a data analyst or data scientist should not only have a good technical skill, such as programming skill in R or Python, but also has a good understanding on business. Moreover they should have good analytical and communication skill.

The emerge condition on data technology and its implementation in several areas drive me to also taking a role in data analysis area. I want to continue my career as a data analyst professional and working in an industry, afterwards I also have an aspiration to involve in academic area, become a teacher in data analysis major.My aspiration on data analysis and data science area, especially for my country is more implementation and strategy on data science and analytic implementation in healthcare industry and also in government. It seems that Indonesia is still lack on the research as well as implementation relating to data analysis in healthcare sector, whereas implementation of data analysis on healthcare industry will help healthcare sector optimizing their resources, also enabling them in delivering better service to the patients.

United States is well known for its good education system which offers various kind of university programs both on undergraduate and graduate degree. Almost US universities are in the list of best 100 schools in the world. In computer and information systems program as well, US universities mostly become top university in that program. The University of Michigan is one of the best public school in the US, offering various program and has been proved on its good quality of research. Relating to data analysis, I interested in applying to master program in the School of Information University of Michigan. The program offer lots of choices in the field of information. The program is very flexible and opens for any various kind of undergraduate backgrounds, not only for those who are graduating from information technology major. School of information offers 2 year full time master degree program where the students either can choose among some specialization or create their own study journey (tailored program). In the field of data science/data analysis which I will take, the program offers some courses like data manipulation, data analysis, economics, e-commerce, big data, and computational social science. The courses of data science/data analysis not only give technical skill aspects to the students, but also give students a deep understanding about the social impact of information technology. So that, student get insight to implementing data analysis to solve social related problem. Most interesting thing about the program is to complete the degree

program student also required to take an internship in the industry based on their specialization, I think it will be so challenging yet fun thing. Since students will directly involve in real industrial project on information technology field, students can improve both their technical and soft skills, also they will get real experience on how information technology be implemented on industry. School of Information also actively conducting some researches granted by some agencies and governments, UMSI opens very high opportunity on research activity for its student. By its education systems and courses offered by the program, I believe that UMSI will provide me the best experience in studying information field, specializing on data science and analysis.

During my study in UMSI I will actively involve not only in formal study by attending the class and conducting the research activities, I will also join in some communities in the school, especially on data technology related area, for example A2 Data Drive, a community that collaborate with some organizations to work together in solving social issue using data. In research activity I plan to specializing on the research related to data technology and its implementation in healthcare and also online media.