Look a little deeper.

When I started the blog, my goal was to provide a little deeper look into what the student experience is like -- what kinds of things I was learning and how those things were changing my thinking or enhancing my knowledge of agribusiness.

So today I've got one for you. An interesting article and web item I ran across that's straight from the subject of our most recent MAB course.

The Class of 2010 just wrapped up Dr. Bergtold's Optimization course (Ag Ec 761). It was a fast-paced look at optimization models and how agribusinesses can utilize data to make better decisions. The course essentially taught me to take data and trends and turn them into functional, decision-making models in Microsoft Excel.

This was new territory. I didn't do this in my job prior to the class. And I never toyed with building models in Excel in order to streamline business decisions. But, as I learned from Dr. Bergtold, it's big business in a lot of big businesses.

And my recent find in BusinessWeek magazine has me wondering about the kinds of opportunities this work will present in the agriculture and food sector.

There's a neat article and accompanying video clip about Stephen Baker's new book, "The Numerati". He's a writer for the magazine who has taken a deep look into the business of optimization and operations research -- essentially, the practice of numerating business data in order to build models like the ones we studied in our MAB course.

I've not picked up the book yet, but hope to add it to my fall reading list. I'm not sure if this will end up being part of my MAB thesis yet, but I did find the whole practice pretty interesting. Over the two month period of Ag Ec 761 we learned a lot about decision variables and modeling data to determine optimal outcomes in business. And Dr. Bergtold assures me there's much, much more to discover about operations research for the student who is so inclined.

Give the subject a quick Google search and you'll see there is a lot out there. And it's just a part of the knowledge we're surfacing throughout our first year in K-State's MAB program.