Practicum Projects

The UC Davis Master of Science in Business Analytics Practicum provides students with real-world applied professional experience working in data, analytics and AI in the world’s most fertile ground for data and AI innovation. During the one-year course, you will be embedded within a San Francisco Bay Area or U.S. based company to solve challenging business problems, working alongside their data and analytics teams.

How the practicum project works

Students are thrust into a real business problem, with real analytics professionals, real data, and real accountability and expectations. Each project spans the full analytics lifecycle: defining requirements, building data pipelines, developing models, and designing dashboards and bots that translate data into action. You’ll work across data engineering, decision science, MLOps, project management and engagement cross-functional teams to deliver tangible results to business stakeholders.

Student teams have delivered solutions in areas such as:

• Web-scraping data ingestion to be fed into machine learning models
• Customer engagement strategies and customer sentiment analysis
• LLM-based applications such as chatbots and decision support

You won’t just build on what you know. You’ll master new tools, learn new methods and broaden your skill set with every stage of the project. It’s a hands-on, high-impact experience that sets you apart.

Our MSBA teams have a strong record of adoption by partner organizations. In recent cohorts, 100% of companies have adopted or implemented our student teams’ solutions and recommendations.

By the numbers (current projects)

Small team sizes create a boutique experience where every teammate is fully involved.

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Leading the practicum team for the UC Davis Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts was the highlight of my program. We partnered with their business intelligence team to understand the audience better, predict customer behavior patterns and develop data-driven engagement strategies. — Yufan (Via) Lin MSBA 25

Practicum projects and AI

50% of our practicum projects in 2025–2026 use cutting-edge AI tools. Our teams are:

• Building an AI knowledge assistant for criminal justice reform that enables public defenders and researchers to query California prison data using natural language, helping identify racial disparities and resentencing opportunities that could correct systemic injustices.
• Building an insurance operations copilot that uses large language models to let underwriters and brokers query complex financial data in plain English, replacing weeks of manual SQL queries.
• Enhancing a nationwide notary database by integrating an OpenAI API to auto-complete missing records, validate entries and improve overall data quality.

Industry perspectives

During the practicum course, you’ll hear directly from guest speakers from leading Bay Area organizations and gain insight into emerging business analytics trends. Recent speakers have come from Salesforce, Visa, Amazon, ZoomInfo, UCSF, Warner Brothers and IQVIA.

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My MSBA practicum project gave me the confidence to walk into interviews with concrete examples of how I could create value for an organization. — Sanjay Puri MSBA 25