MGT 6655 – Business Data Preparation and Visualization

Teaching Assistant for MGT 6655 – Business Data Preparation and Visualization at Georgia Tech (Spring 2026), working with Prof. Mingfeng Lin.

About the Course

MGT 6655 is a graduate-level course in the Scheller College of Business covering data visualization for two distinct purposes: exploratory analysis (understanding your own data) and explanatory communication (convincing an audience). The course is tool-heavy — Tableau Desktop, Tableau Prep Builder, Microsoft Power BI, Excel, NodeXL, and R — and places significant emphasis on visualization critique and design principles alongside the mechanics of data preparation and cleaning. It runs asynchronously online, which adds its own organizational demands.

Responsibilities

Grade weekly quizzes, visualization exercises, and dashboard projects, with written feedback on both technical execution (e.g., data joins, calculated fields in Tableau) and design choices (chart type selection, color, layout). Respond to student questions on Ed Discussions on data preparation workflows, tool-specific issues, and visualization principles. Support students with software setup and troubleshooting, which takes a nontrivial amount of time given the range of tools and the asynchronous online format.

Additionally, I built a privacy-preserving LLM-based Q&A assistant for the course’s 100+ students from the ground up. This involved developing an end-to-end Python pipeline to transform Ed Discussion data into RAG and SFT datasets (in JSONL format) featuring schema-tolerant parsing and comprehensive metadata traceability. Furthermore, I deployed a grounded, retrieval-augmented assistant equipped with configurable embedding backends and GPU-ready evaluation workflows to deliver a scalable, reproducible inference pipeline.

Instructor

Prof. Mingfeng Lin, Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology