Payton receives first SAS Faculty Fellow Award

Fay Cobb Payton, associate professor of information systems at NC State’s College of Management, was recently named a SAS Faculty Fellow.

“Fay was selected to be the first recipient of this annual award because she exemplifies what we are looking for in a professor – excellent classroom teaching and strong SAS skills,” said Catherine Gihlstorf, curriculum resources manager with SAS’s academic program.

The award was presented formally to Payton during her IT capstone class on Mar. 26.

Payton uses SAS software in several of her classes, and has been developing a set of teaching materials that SAS will make available to other instructors in the future through its new curriculum builder program.

“This program will provide sets of teaching materials on particular subjects,” Gihlstorf said. Included will be slide sets, teaching notes, data sets, white papers, tutorials – “all the materials that a professor would need to teach students that subject, using SAS for the analytical work,” she said.

“We are doing this because it is important for students to get hands-on experience with industry-standard software,” Gihlstorf said. “We want students to have an appreciation for the amounts of data that are available, and to understand the value of analytics,” she said.

“They need to understand how to use the tools they will be facing when they start their careers,” Gihlstorf added. “This is especially important in this college, where the focus is on the management of technology, because the students will be expected to have this experience when they come out.”

Students in Payton’s current IT capstone class have been using SAS software to analyze retail data based on information from a pet food retailer in the United Kingdom. “The data set is very rich in content,” Payton said, “so we can look at trends and patterns and discuss how that impacts decision making. It’s been a high-stress class, but it’s a good stress.”

The students, working in teams, are looking at customer loyalty, customer churn or turnover, touch points for connecting with the customer, and other factors. The data has been fabricated from a real database provided by vendors in England.

That international touch is an important added value for the students, Payton said. “I want students to be comfortable with international thinking and working within a context other than the United States,” she said.

She also wants her students to use “integrated learning skills,” she said. “There are loads of databases available that will help them make inferences and recommendations. The main thrust behind the course is relevance,” she said. “Organizations want to see relevance, problem solving and teaming skills. That’s what work is about.”

Payton has been teaching versions of the capstone class since 2001, and has been working with SAS products in different courses since 1999, at both the undergraduate and MBA levels. She has used SAS analytic tools in other industries including health care, education, not-for-profit, and manufacturing.

Payton developed her current course with funding from the university’s Learning in a Technology Rich Environment curriculum development program.