First of all, let me thank you for giving me this opportunity. This is really a great opportunity to be able to speak to future scholars and I would like to thank you for doing this such a great initiative. Originally, I was born in Bangladesh, Dhaka. I moved to the US for my college after finishing high school in Bangladesh and then once I did my undergrad, my MBA, my PhD. I actually was at the University of Calgary, first 6 years of my career as an assistant professor there, then I became an associate there. So, I spent some time, 6 years in Canada and then I'm back in the US. In terms of substantially living in different places, these are the few places where I lived, substantial other time. I mean I guess in terms of enjoyment, it's funny, I guess your enjoyment change maybe with at least for some people with PhD and with the faculty life but I still enjoy music a lot. I'm a foodie. I love to eat and try all kinds of cuisine. If I get time, I actually like to do some gardening but that seems to be a rare commodity these days. I have a small son now, he's about four years old. A big chunk of my time these days in terms of enjoyment is just spending time with him, playing with him and doing things that he wants to do. Just as simple as catching the baseball or like to just following him and running around, whatever he wants. So that seems to be the life.

Great! So, we do have programs starting from bachelor’s to all the way to PhDs. So. let me start with Bachelor then I'll talk about the Graduate programs we have different versions and then the PhD program. In the bachelor program, we have few majors like management, we have finance, marketing. I’m in the area of Information Systems which is under the broad umbrella of Supply Chain and Information Analytics. Krannert and Purdue being more of a quant schools so there is a lot more focus on the quant side in terms of training our students. So, we try to make sure we are creating analytical leaders that are ready to sort of be leading in the business world where analytical skills are actually becoming more and more important and also how they can manage innovations because we, I guess, live in a world right now where innovations are coming up all the time, perhaps at a faster rate than other times. So, the goal in our program, in the undergrad program, is to prepare students where they have the foundation and generally it's more quantitative-oriented foundation. MIS or Information Systems or Supply Chain Analytics and Information Systems or data analytics kind of focus then they have all the skills in managing data. How do you leverage large data, big data to make decisions so that's the sort of the focus of our graduates. If you look at our finance program, still there is lot more quant to that. Marketing’s the same way, we have people/students who are taking classes of marketing analytics. So that is our strength and that's where we play a lot in the program. Personally, I teach a class in the undergraduate program, it’s called Data-Driven Decisions and Digital Markets, those all courses are designed around data-thinking. This resonates with our shift in terms of generating more and more data-savvy students. We have always been a quant school, but we are really trying to make sure all our students are also data-savvy and I think Purdue right there now use initiative to make sure this is the case for most majors, most students at Purdue. In my class, the goal is how do you do data-thinking. The idea is, if you have a business problem, how do you convert that business-problem into a data-problem and then what kind of data do you look for, how do you find the kind of right set of data? Can you always find the right set of data? Should we always look for data? There are even decision making that is great but there are scenarios where experience is important. Experience trumps what data is saying or data can possibly say or maybe data is not even there. We talk about those kinds of things but then once you convert a problem into a data-problem then do that analysis and then once we get things like how do you convert that into a business action? So that's sort of the goal we have for our Bachelor’s.At the graduate level, we have different programs. Of course, we have our MBA program, two years full-time MBA program and we also have some weekend MBA programs. But the full time MBA is basically again for people who have had some experience in the job now, they’re trying to climb up the ladder so we bring them back and we give them managerial skills so they're ready to basically lead the business. And we also have now a Master’s in Business Analytics and Information Management and a few other master’s like Master’s in Finance Marketing. Now, the master’s is designed for students who just finished bachelor’s, so who just have one or two years’ experience. Not quite there in terms of taking the managerial innovation leading kind of roles but still they want to get a graduate education to be more sort of deep in some sort of field. So, for example it could be Analytics, Business Analytics which is now very popular. So, these students we basically give them with all kinds of tools so we are getting a lot of students from diverse backgrounds like they come from Statistics, they come from Engineering but then the goal is again we give them tools on R, Python, so these are the basic sort of technical tools but then you also think about how we apply them so application tools. So for example I teach a class on Web Data Analytics. In this class, we talk about how do we use python to actually scrape data available on the web? It could be for companies that you work on that are trying to understand what’s the social media is talking about for the company. It could be if you're in finance, you're trying to actually get all the SEC filing. If you're working in an investment company or if you’re working some domain in financing and you want to know the SEC filing of all these mutual funds or all these 10k’s from publicly trading companies, you need these tools to be able to scrape and manipulate the data. And then we talk about how do you connect to APIs to actually get all the let's see if you want to know what Twitter is doing about your company so how do you get that stuff? How do you analyze? But then the data collection part and the analytics part is okay, how do you take the data and model it to come up with insights? In the business school, the goal is always how do we take something and convert it into a business action? So, that's what this one is due, and this is the program we have and there we have many different classes like that too. So, we have again a Marketing Analytics class. We have a Predictive Analytics class, we have such classes. We are actually thinking of introducing some of the more hard edge, cutting edge classes like Algorithmic Business thinking sort of classes in the future. So, that's our graduate level. And then for the PhD, of course, we have a PhD program and we have produced many good scholars in the past. The PhD program is really designed to train students on advanced skills. Primarily students who are interested in going into academia, but we are seeing some students who are also interested in going to industries/companies like Google or Amazon or as such. But here again the goal is, of course, training them rigorously in quantitative methods that’s really our goal. So, we are very big on Econometrics, Econ kind of training. And then also Computer Science kind of training. Purdue is a very transdisciplinary place. Students can go take classes from Computer Science. When I was a student here, I am taking classes from Computer Science. Right now, my key student, I asked him to go to Computer Science, take classes on Machine Learning, because we're combining Machine Learning and Econometrics to really answer questions. How do we establish causality and things like that? So, we have that. And in that program, that’s about four to five years. We take students who are even just as recently as a bachelor graduates but more often will also get students who are probably with some sort of graduate degree. So that’s sort of the spec we have in credit at Purdue.

Yeah, so first of all, I think it's always important for students to know that we are very welcoming to students from all over the world, specially all over the states. We have students from many different states. A lot of students just think like you got to go to school within your state, that’s not necessarily true, right? So, we are a very welcoming place. I guess one of the things I would say is if you're looking for a safe and a very collegial learning environment, Purdue is a good fit. It's a great place for students to be getting a lot of opportunities. There are a lot of things happening so right now like for example I'm running a data dive which is basically with a large company, Cisco. Cisco is giving their real business problem they’re facing right now. And they're giving data, real data, that's all Cisco data that only their employees have access to and they're working on, actually running an internal competition on the same problem. So, we have these now inter-Purdue, across the campus, all undergraduate and master's students, graduate students are welcome to compete in this competition. Get a great experience and they'll present in front of some of the top executives. Like last year and I guess this year I'm also gonna have some senior leaders from Cisco. Actually, this year I’m probably gonna have two, some of the CIOs and the higher-level executives from other companies. And then you present in front of them and then you get direct feedback. I do not think you can get that sort of opportunity in many different places. In fact, I think, the data dive idea is from what we believe in law as we are one of the first ones to do this. I came up with this idea in 2015 and then we did it with Walmart in 2016. There are a lot of opportunities like that, so it's not just we provide the educational opportunities but there are other extracurricular activities. Other activities that are here where you can experience and learn, and I think that’s becoming very important before you go to work. Right now, in a lot of industries actually expect that the students have some internship experience. They are actually involved with case competitions and things like that. So, we do have all those kinds of things. We have a lot of other things like clubs, a lot of musical programs and cultural programs, things like that. I guess in terms of misconception, some people think Purdue is probably very expensive which is not true. We have had a tuition freeze for about now 7/8 years? So, it's probably I think it’s starting out to be more economical for many students even out of states than they’re in state schools. And I think one thing I would say in terms of business versus other fields. So, I know a lot of students, they are very interested in Math or Engineering, so they're very good at Math and then next road they think they need to go to Math or Engineering programs. I would highly encourage them to think of a business program like ours. It’s a very quantitative business program, I know a lot of students later on they want to move to the business school. I would say to look into thinking about the business school for the beginning. If you have a very strong quant background, do that. It might be a good time to start from the beginning because you're not gonna get any less Math than many other programs that you're doing outside of the business school. And then you're working on many interesting business problems. I would say that's an important thing for students to think about.