MSc Data Analytics (including Professional Practice)

Develop your skills in the various methods used to analyse big data sets and build a career in this exciting area where your knowledge and experience will be in high demand. This course also features the opportunity to undertake a professional placement in its second year.

Course outline and modules

Data plays an increasingly important role in modern life, yet the talent to extract information and value from complex data is scarce.

This course is for you if you want to use your mathematical and numerical skills to build your career. During the course you will develop an informed and critical appreciation of scientific and industrial developments in data science and analytics.

The difference between this course and the MSc Data Analytics course is that this one features a professional placement. Students are responsible for finding their own work placement, with the help of our award-winning Careers and Placements Team, who have helped so many of our students to secure placement and work opportunities. Aston is 3rd in the UK for the number of students taking a sandwich year (HESA 2018), showing just how much we encourage students getting professional experience and how successful we are at enabling them to secure work placements. Take a look at our specific placement information and support. Please find more about the time frame under ‘Learning, teaching and assessment’.

What you’ll learn

You’ll gain a thorough grounding in the fundamental concepts to understand the data lifecycle, including problem formulation, data collection and cleaning, exploratory data analysis and visualisation, statistical inference and decision making. A range of methods will be covered including algorithmic and computational modelling and statistical machine learning.

You’ll also undertake a research project on a subject of your choice, where you’ll apply the knowledge you’ve gained to produce high quality independent work.

Career prospects

Our graduates leave with the in-depth knowledge and skills they need to develop careers across the field of data science.

Students on similar programmes have gone on to roles including: finance and investment analysts and advisers; IT business analysts, architects and systems designers; management consultants and business analysts; as well as programmers and software development professionals at some of the world’s most prestigious companies.