“Before I joined the SMU program, I crunched the numbers, as a good analyst should. And I calculated where my career was, and where it could go with data science. The resulting salary increase as a graduate would take me about five years to pay off … [but] I paid off all of my debt within a year and a half of graduating. After starting the program, I received a job offer. Just to be a data scientist while in the program, to help companies build it out, the need was so high, the demand was so intense, companies are willing to start the hiring process before you graduate.”

“You have to put in the hard effort. You have to put in sweat. And you have to go through the proper steps. That’s what SMU does. It gives you the true understanding of what’s necessary to be a data scientist and backs it up with the SMU name. Nobody can do better.”

“When I graduated from SMU with a master’s in data science, I was one of the first 500 people in the world with an actual degree in data science. … I like to joke around that I [was] the only data scientist at the company with a degree in data science. I’m the only one who’s comfortable talking [to business people about] any scenario they throw at us because I don’t have to worry about not understanding what the business is asking.”

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