Computing for Analytical Work

ECBS5293 · Central European University · MSBA · 2026–2027

One credit of practical instruction in the layer beneath your other courses: the filesystem, the shell, processes, Python environments, Git, and the habit of diagnosing what actually went wrong.

Instructor: Eduardo Ariño de la Rubia · RubiaE@ceu.edu

Co-authors: Boglarka Petruska · Nahian Ibnat

You will spend the next year writing code, training models, and analyzing data — and then keep doing those things for the rest of your career. Most of the problems that block you in that work will not be statistics or modeling. They will be computing problems: missing files, the wrong Python, notebooks that won’t restart cleanly, errors you don’t know how to read.

This course is one credit of practical instruction in the layer beneath your other courses. It is not a Python course. It is a course on the operating system, the filesystem, the processes, the shell, the environments, and the version-control system your code actually runs on top of. Your other courses ask what you should compute; this one asks where the file actually is, which process is running, in which environment, with which dependencies — and how to recognize, quickly, when something has silently gone wrong.

Three sessions, one question each: Where am I? · What is running? · What broke? Every lab hands you an intentionally broken project to diagnose, repair, verify, and explain.

Schedule

#	Unit	Date	Materials
1	Session 1 — Where am I?	Mon 14 Sep 2026	Released
2	Session 2 — What is running?	Mon 21 Sep 2026	Released
3	Session 3 — What broke?	Mon 28 Sep 2026	Released

See the Syllabus for assessment, policies, and setup.