COMM 4522

Professor Li is one of the best professors I've had at UVA! She cares a lot about her students and prioritizes how much they learn and understand the information. She has high expectations, especially with the final project, but her expectations are very clear and very fair. Also, she is very available for help outside of class either in office hours or over email, and responds very quickly.

She has a ton of experience in the field and is really smart, and I felt like I learned so much both in class and in the project. It is definitely a lot of work but she provides a lot of resources and help if you ask for it. Would definitely recommend this class to anyone interested in BA or python!

Professor Li is great, she really wants the best out of her students and is super communicative about deadlines/expectations. In this class you'll learn a ton about the entire process start to finish of cleaning, transforming, modeling, and applying data in a business analytics capacity. The class culminates in a consulting style business analytics project/presentation and you get to pick your own data set, so it's a very hands on experience. There are some reading write-ups at the beginning of the class, no clue why they exist but it's not that bad, 0.5-1 page summaries. There are 6 homework assignments; most take around 1-2 hours max but I found assignment 5 (the one with ensemble methods) to be particularly difficult, so definitely work ahead on homeworks. There are 5 quizzes which adhere pretty closely to the slides, but sometimes go more in-depth and include things from the readings. Lectures can be a bit dry as it is python/CS concepts at the end of the day but Prof. Li makes the class pretty interesting and light. Overall a moderately challenging class but very useful.

If you're planning on a career in data analytics, this class would likely be a wonderful introduction, as you'll get comfortable with python and learn a lot of useful methods for cleaning data and analyzing it. Professor Li, as a former Microsoft data scientist, is very well connected and is super willing to help you with your career, so definitely leverage her network and expertise.

The Business Analytics class I took was certainly a challenge. The material was covered quickly, leaving me feeling like I was often struggling to keep up. On top of that, I felt the final project was unreasonably graded. Though I worked hard to complete it to the best of my ability, I was still given a B+ instead of the A- that I had hoped for. Unfortunately, the professor refused to curve my grade, leaving me feeling like I was being judged too harshly.
I understand that a professor has the right to grade however they deem appropriate, but I feel like in this situation, a bit of flexibility would have been beneficial. A .16% difference between a B+ and an A- is minimal, and I believe that curving my grade to reflect that could have been beneficial. It would have allowed me to feel more engaged in the class, knowing that there was a chance for me to do well.

I recently took a course with Professor Li and had a mixed experience. On the positive side, the course was fairly organized and the low-code programming platform was easy to use. However, if we didn't understand something, it was difficult to learn and address it because the material was covered quickly in the lectures and labs.

Professor Li was also inconsistent in her responses to students, which made it harder for us to get help when we needed it. The group assignment was standard but felt disorganized, and it took a long time to complete due to the need to run it multiple times to meet Professor Li's requirements.

Overall, I would recommend this course for students who are looking for an easier class in the business analysis track. However, note that this course may be easier, the python course may be more useful in terms of preparing for business analysis jobs.

I enjoyed BA in Python with Prof. Li. She is a sweet person who is kind of regretful about leaving Microsoft for teaching even though she justifies that she made the right decision.
She markets this class as a data science course, and the topics covered are complicated. The class format is typically one lecture class followed by a lab class where you see the code for the topics discussed. There were 5 homework assignments (plus an optional one), a few reading write-ups and a group project (with two deliverables and a final presentation). The group project can be a little challenging if you don't have a good group. Luckily, she organizes the group so that there is a CS double major or coding proficient in every team.
Prof. Li does make the content more digestible, but it inevitably gets dry because the type of material. She really tries to squeeze a lot of material into the class which I appreciate, but the class does feel rushed. There is a lot of overlap in the beginning with COMM 4351 Marketing Analytics with Big Data (I took those two classes at the same time). I haven't learned much in the area of coding because the assignments are just you copying the code from the lab and changing the variable names. However, that's what a real job in data science looks like anyway.
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I took the BA with Python section of this class. I would say it's a medium workload with a 3-hour assignment due every other week. There are no exams, and 30% of the grade is based on group work. The group project has a report due early November and a presentation due at the end of November.
I think for this class a lot of your experience depends on who's in your group, but that's most comm classes.
Professor Li is super responsive, and if you ever need any help go to her office hours! She's very extroverted, sweet, and one of the best in her field.
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