The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business is paving the way for students interested in working with “big business and big money” by adding a new major: business analytics and information systems.

The major will teach students how to manage large and various amounts of data, according to a UI press release. The major will be one of the first undergraduate business school majors to address big data.

“[Business analytics] has a strong focus on ‘predicting’ outcomes and ‘prescribing’ solutions instead of simply ‘describing’ and ‘explaining’ the past, as is often done with statistics,” Gautam Pant, a UI associate professor of management sciences at the UI, said in the release.

Jeffrey Ohlmann, a UI associate professor of management sciences, said the major includes skills from a number of different areas.

“In a sense, the major combines topics from computer science, industrial engineering, mathematics, and statistics and teaches them through the prism of business problem solving,” he said in the release.

According to the UI’s description of the program, “[the] major is where students can navigate the intersections of business, big data, and information technology, a skill set increasingly sought by many companies.”

— by Kristen East