For the 2013/14 academic year I returned to the University of Edinburgh to participate in the Operational Research MSc. I held a scholarship from the School of Mathematics for the duration of my studies, and on completion received the Wood Mackenzie prize for best performance.
The course at Edinburgh comes in several flavours, but all OR students follow a common core for the first semester. Thus I initially took the following courses:
- Computing for OR and Finance;
- Fundamentals of Optimization;
- Fundamentals of OR;
- Methodology, Modelling and Consulting Skills;
- Probability and Statistics;
- Simulation.
Whilst for semester two I studied:
- Stochastic Modelling;
- Credit Scoring and Data Mining;
- Operational Research in Telecommunications;
- Operational Research in the Airline Industry;
- Combinatorial Optimization;
- Stochastic Optimization;
- Statistical Modelling;
- Time Series Analysis and Forecasting;
- Advanced Computing for Operational Research;
- Risk Analysis.
During Innovative Learning Week I was involved in the Giant 4D Buckyball project, which I wrote a series of posts about; and was the winner of the Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament (which I will not write about, for the sake of future tournaments!)
For the summer I worked with the National Records of Scotland on a project entitled Data Visualisation of Scottish Demographic Information; you can download my dissertation (note: 7.54Mb PDF).