‘The Master’s Business Analysis and Modelling contains a combination of courses related to the analytical and social aspects of decision making in complex environments. I perceived the combination of courses as useful and relevant to modern society, since companies and institutions increasingly find themselves in complex environments, wherein decisions influence the environment and many stakeholders. In this specialization you learn to elicit the right information, connect with stakeholders, and model and analyze the effects of decisions, in order to advice the right course of action.
In this Master’s specialization you will study in a challenging international environment, given that the courses are combined with the two-year master programme System Dynamics. As the programme is somewhat more digested to the two-year Master’s programme, these students salience with a year of experience in related courses, however this gives the opportunity to pursue a steep learning curve. Compared to other Master’s specializations the group of students who perform the Master’s is quite small, in our year there were 30 students in total. As you can expect this has its pros and cons, in my experience this resulted in a flexible environment with possibilities to adjust the Master’s track in line with your own ambitions. Likewise, the relationship with the professors is good and favourable for the flexible environment.
The Master’s specialization did not fully cover my expectations, as the focus of the Master’s is more on the social aspects of eliciting knowledge rather than in depth modelling. Despite my expectation, I perceived the social aspects as particularly useful and applicable in many situations. Additionally, we were able to include a modelling course as one of the elective courses at a partner university in Bergen, which partly covered the analytic modelling I was missing in the programme itself.
Since I have always been interested in entrepreneurship and investing, I decided that I wanted to perform an extra practical internship during my Master’s thesis. Which I performed at a company who manages a crowdfund platform and several start-up investment funds. My Master’s thesis related to this same field of interest, which is described as entrepreneurial finance. In my thesis, I developed a decision model to evaluate the skills, abilities and knowledge of the entrepreneur and management team of a start-up before the investment is made, which helps to increase the decision quality of potential investments.
In general, I think a universal Master’s study builds up a certain basis of skills, abilities and knowledge. Thereby it gives you the opportunity to discover your fields of interests and to build up a useful network for the rest of your career. I found my interest in the field of entrepreneurship and investing, in which I will seek my next opportunity.'