The Waterloo Model of Data Analytics & Emerging Technologies
The data analytics and emerging technologies (DA&T) curriculum implemented at the school of Accounting and Finance (SAF) reflects the goal of the school’s strategy committee to “develop tech-savvy financial leaders … fluent in the languages of business, analytics, and technology.”
To achieve this goal the committee decided to position DA&T as equally important for the future professional success of SAF students as financial accounting, basic business concepts, and economics. The curriculum is divided into a set of required courses that all SAF students have to complete during their first and second year, and a set of electives for students who want to pursue a specialization in DA&T. View the Arts Degree Requirements - Bachelor of Accounting and Financial Management for an up to date list of current course offerings.
- 1st & 2nd Year Required Courses in DA&T
The primary objective of these courses is to help students develop - early on - a data analytics mindset. This means that they should be able to frame a business problem as a decision or question, understand and prepare the data for analysis, build a model using the appropriate tool (e.g., spreadsheets, R, Tableau, RPA or a combination of these tools) to solve a business problem, evaluate and communicate analysis results in an interesting, attention-getting way.
- AFM 112 - Introduction to Business Analytics I (Intro to spreadsheets and R)
- AFM 113 - Introduction to Business Analytics II (Statistics with R)
- AFM 207 - Data Visualization and Storytelling (visualizations with Tableau)
- AFM 241 - Emerging Technologies in Business. Why companies invest in emerging technologies & role of RPA in business (RPA cases with AutomationAnywhere)
- AFM 244 - Foundations of Data Mining. The course leverages relational database theory and SQL to understand and prepare data and regression/auto-ARIMA to model/evaluate forecasting based on time-series (tools used R, spreadsheets, and Tableau)
- Data Analytics & Technology Specialization
Students who want to pursue a specialization in DA&T will have to select six-electives from the following list:
- AFM 323 - Quantitative Foundations for Finance
- AFM 341 - Accounting Information Systems
- AFM 344 - Business Analytics Project Delivery
- AFM 345 - Business Applications of Social Media Analytics
- AFM 346 - Applications of Predictive Analytics in Accounting and Finance
- AFM 347 - Cybersecurity
- AFM 423 - Topics in Financial Econometrics
- AFM 444 - Business Analytics Project Management
- AFM 445 - Information Technology Assurance and Audit Analytics
- AFM 446 - Performance Management and Tax Analytics
- AFM 447 - Governance and Ethical Issues with Data and Emerging Technologies
- AFM 448 - SAF Data Analytics and Emerging Technologies Consulting Group