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Loyola Magazine

Sellinger School of Business and Management Opens Data Analytics Visualization Lab

Become a Wiz at Data Viz
Jessica Goldstein and Molly Robey
Several students sitting at a table watching a professor pointing at a screen above them
Photo credits: Louis Umerlik, 鈥�96

In today’s age of big data, understanding data analytics visualization—the process of curating data into a clear, concise visually compelling story—is increasingly important.

A growing number of industries seek graduates with data visualization skills, which can help decision-makers understand financial data, real-time supply chains, overcome bottlenecks, streamline operations, and more.

So, the timing couldn’t be better for the opening of Loyola’s new data analytics visualization lab, a state-of-the-art classroom outfitted with technology to help students interpret, manipulate, and present large amounts of data.

The lab will help turn students into storytellers. It鈥檚 not enough anymore to compile data. You need to be able to draw meaningful conclusions and to convey that meaning to stakeholders.

鈥擩P Krahel, Ph.D., CPA, associate professor and chair of accounting

Housed in the Sellinger School of Business and Management, students from a range of academic majors including accounting and information systems use the lab to learn skills crucial to the future of business.

The data analytics visualization lab offers powerful computing, projectors with touch capability on a 12-foot smartboard, seven large display monitors for huddle areas, integrated Zoom video conferencing with a high-resolution camera that can track subjects, and movable, modular classroom furniture. The technology allows students to convert raw data into colorful charts, graphs, maps, dashboards, and other graphics to aid in data-driven storytelling and decision-making.

"Labs like this include state-of-the-art systems that help students visualize massive amounts of data. This is a dream space for both students and faculty," says Paul Tallon, Ph.D., professor of information systems and chair of Loyola’s department of information systems, law, and operations management. "We are already reimagining courses to take advantage of everything this room has to offer. Students can learn and collaborate in radically new ways that will build skills for a data-centric world."

Best Business School by the Numbers

The Sellinger School has a longstanding record for excellence and national rankings at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, including:

  • The Sellinger School is named a 2021 Best Business School (of just 244 in the country) by the Princeton Review.
  • The Sellinger School has consistently been ranked in U.S. News & World Report鈥檚 Best Graduate Schools list鈥攊ncluding for 2023.
  • 98% of Sellinger alumni are employed full-time or in graduate programs within six to nine months of receiving their diplomas鈥� and earn mid-career salaries 30% higher than graduates of competitor institutions.
  • Loyola ranks in the top 3% nationally in PayScale.com鈥檚 2021 College Salary Report for best undergraduate business universities by salary.
  • Only 5% of business schools worldwide share Loyola鈥檚 AACSB- International Accreditation.

Learn more about the Sellinger School of Business and Management

1897 Flashback

Black and white photo of students in the late 19th century posing in front of an x-ray machine
Loyola students pose at their X-ray presentation with seismologist and physics professor, Rev. Francis Tondorf, S.J., who is believed to have inspired the project. Photo courtesy of Loyola/Notre Dame Library.

Loyola students have often been on the forefront of technology experimentation. Nicholas Varga鈥檚 Baltimore鈥檚 Loyola, Loyola鈥檚 Baltimore, recounts how students participated in a demonstration of X-ray technology just two years after its discovery. Some of the X-ray pictures survive in an album in the archives of Saint Ignatius Church in Baltimore.