Dear David Unger,

• New and Enhanced Concentrations:  QMSS offers training that is methodologically rigorous while still allowing students the flexibility and opportunity to pursue research across a broad range of topics.  Its curriculum helps students to develop sophisticated skills in research design and statistical analysis as well as interdisciplinary fluency.  In addition to its traditional track, QMSS began offering last academic year an Economics Concentration that provides students interested in this discipline with a framework for a comprehensive Master’s-level course of study. This year, we significantly improved the Economics Concentration to better suit student interests and qualifications through enhanced integration with Columbia’s world-class Department of Economics.

  We also began offering two new concentrations to provide cutting-edge training in areas where the demand for quantitative researchers has increased substantially:

  • Data Science Concentration: The emerging field of data science has the potential to revolutionize the social sciences where the analysis of “Big Data” is playing an expanding role in the exploration of the economic, political, and social world. In conjunction with Columbia’s new Institute for Data Science and Engineering (IDSE), QMSS launched in Fall 2013 a Data Science Concentration exclusively for its students, making it the first Master’s program at Columbia to offer formal data science training. Students who have been accepted into the concentration are eligible to enroll in a set of courses offered through IDSE as part of their certificate program in Data Science.
  • Experiments Concentration: Experimental methods are fundamentally reshaping the social sciences.  For students who are interested in harnessing the power of lab and field experiments to understand causal processes, QMSS now offers an Experiments Concentration. The concentration, drawing on multiple experiments-oriented initiatives across campus, provides courses that train students in the complexities of causal inference and in the design, implementation, and analysis of experiments. This concentration is especially suited to students interested in learning how to implement state of the art policy evaluations or in learning how to set up experiments to understand causal processes underlying patterns of political and economic development.

• Expanded Research Assistantship Program:  In order to accomplish the QMSS objective of producing highly qualified quantitative researchers, we provide students with numerous opportunities to obtain research experience outside of the classroom. QMSS matches students with faculty across the university to work as their paid research assistants and has committed a considerable portion of its budget toward financially supporting students who participate in the program. This program has expanded significantly over the past two academic years — approximately half of students who entered the program in Fall 2013 have already been matched with faculty and have begun work on original research projects.

• Curriculum Enhancement:  Based on feedback over the years from students and faculty, QMSS has undergone several modifications in an effort to improve the training and education it offers and remain in the vanguard of the ever-changing field of data analytics. Changes in the past year have included curriculum enhancements to provide more structure for conceiving and executing thesis research, formalized thesis adviser relationships to promote mentorship of students by faculty,  as well as the addition of new courses, such as Data Visualization, Missing Data, and Social Network Analysis.

• Columbia QMSS Alumni:  Although QMSS is a relatively young program, it is proud to have produced over three hundred almuni who have gone on to have an impact in a wide array of professions.  The program has been working over the past 18 months with the Columbia Alumni Association as well as QMSS alumni to develop its own formal alumni group to facilitate recruitment, placement, and fundraising to support the program.  Columbia QMSS Alumni launched this fall with its first plenary meeting and will continue to develop as a resource for students — from the application process through alumni status.

Our mailing address is:
420 W 118th Street
MC:3355, Suite 807
New York, NY 10027