Hey! Thanks for checking out my website! My name is Dylan Mustach, and I am from Edmonds, WA (about 20 minutes north of Seattle). I am currently a student at Gonzaga University studying Business Administration. Specifically, my concentrations include Management Information Systems (MIS) and Entrepreneurship.
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated with computers and technology. The way they work to keep people connected, work more efficiently, and so much more has encouraged me to enter the technology sector. My heart and soul are invested in enterprise technology and networking. Seeing the world work entirely remote during the COVID-19 pandemic has showed me how important it is for businesses to remain open and operational. While many businesses have struggled, those who have a top-notch IT staff and modern infrastructure were much less impacted as they were able to seamlessly transition their workforce to a work from home setting. I always knew technology changed the world in a way like no other but seeing how it has improved the lives of so many individuals and businesses during the pandemic has inspired me to improve technology accessibility, allowing others to take advantage of its full potential. This is where my Management Information Systems concentration will help me.
In addition to my passion for technology comes my love for business. Ever since I was a young boy, I knew I wanted to start my own company and build it up to something large. Many of my family members own and work in their own businesses with great success. I knew at a young age that I did not take direction very well (yes, I admit it) and did not want to adhere to “normal”. I wanted to do things on my own terms and go home when I want to. It was obvious that a Monday-Friday 9-5 job was not my going to be my thing, so here is where my entrepreneurship concentration comes in. Learning the skills and concepts through my MIS concentration, along with my own knowledge of technology, my goal is to start a network security company that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to proactively stop threats and protect networks much better than current solutions. My goal is to deploy these solutions in both enterprise and consumer markets, revolutionizing network security across the spectrum.
Within each of these concentrations is a number of classes that will help me achieve my goal. Below is a layout of each class in the respective concentration and a description of that class.
Entrepreneurship and Innovation Concentration
| Class | Term Taken | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Creativity, Innovation & Ent | Third Year, Fall Semester | Prepares students with the fundamentals of idea generation, feasibility assessment, team building, and assembly of resources for the creation of a new venture. The class includes guest speakers, case studies, and a team project. |
| Creating New Ventures | Third Year, Spring Semester | This course covers the fundamentals of creating and growing new commercial or social enterprises. Course content provides an overview of the world of entrepreneurship including an introduction to economics, the role of society and government, legal and ethical issues, creating and managing new ventures, and the various functional areas of business. Students are required to complete a business plan and investor presentation for a commercial or non-profit organization as part of the course requirements. This course counts towards the integrative requirement for business majors. In addition to receiving support from Gonzaga faculty and experienced entrepreneurs, students interact with attorneys, financiers, and other professional service providers. |
| Social Entrepreneurship | Fourth Year, Fall Semester | This course provides students with an introduction to social entrepreneurs (those who create new ventures to address unmet societal needs), the ventures they create, how these ventures create social value, and to provide students with the tools they need to pursue their own social enterprises. Students will address each of the key components of this emerging field: problem identification, solution identification, concept development, venture creation, value assessment, and the communication of the idea and venture goals. Students will explore examples of current social enterprises, leading thinkers in the field of social entrepreneurship, and core entrepreneurial theory focused on social enterprises. |
| New Venture Lab | Fourth Year, Spring Semester | This is an experiential course that provides 'hands-on' experience in developing ideas for new commercial and/or social enterprises. Students work on teams to develop their own or other entrepreneurs' ideas. Projects typically involve feasibility analysis, market research, and business planning. Students receive one credit for each 60 hours worked in the New Venture Lab. Course requirements include keeping a journal, completing assigned project tasks, and submitting a final report detailing learning outcomes. |
Management Information Systems Concentration
| Class | Term Taken | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Prbm Solving & Prog Techniques | Third Year, Fall Semester | This course provides a basic introduction and practical experience in developing algorithms and writing computer programs to solve business problems. Students will be required to design solutions as well as to code, test, and debug programs that are soundly structured and easy to maintain. Topics include variables, data types, control structures, input/output control, arrays, method invocation and parameter passing. |
| Data Analytics for Business | Third Year, Spring Semester | The purpose of the course is to equip students with knowledge, skills, techniques and technologies for data analytics in the context of business. Starting with an introduction to the enterprise business intelligence architecture, the course will proceed to introduce and compare/contrast popular data analytics technologies, such as Power BI, R, and Python, in the market. After that, the course will focus on the development of skills using select data analysis technology. Students will learn how to extract data from heterogeneous data sources, how to transform data into a data format ready for analysis and how to analyze and visualize data. The target students of this course are those in the MIS concentration. The teaching objective is to prepare students to pursue a career in data analytics or to play the role of consultant assisting others in making informed data analytics-related decisions. |
| Data Base Management | Fourth Year, Fall Semester | This course helps students understand, through practice, the concepts of database management. Topics include a broader view in aspects of SQL (Structured Query Language), data modeling, project life cycle, data normalization, data warehousing and data administration. Computer projects are used to give students hands-on experience developing business applications using Oracle in a Client-Server environment. |
| Info System Analysis & Design | Fourth Year, Spring Semester | The full range of business software development is covered in this course, including concepts, tools and techniques in the analysis and design of business information systems. Students will gain experience working with software tools utilized throughout the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Although the course concentrates on the analysis phase of systems development, topics may include strategic planning, system development methodologies, project management, requirements development, data and process modeling using a software engineering CASE tool, object modeling using UML, application architecture, installation and evaluation techniques. |