“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” - Albert Einstein
MBS students had a chance to hear Einstein’s sentiments echoed in full at the Analytics Panel held on October 24, 2019, at the CoRE Building, where three distinguished alumni came to share their experiences working in the field of analytics. The panelists—Bethany Hyde, Eric Sobolewski, and Craig Moran—shared the challenges they faced, details about their present roles, and gave advice to students for our future.
The curiosity of current students and moderation by Abbe Rosenthal, Head of Corporate Partnerships, Student Employment, Alumni Engagement, & Professional Development, led to insightful conversations about the panelists’ career journeys.
Bethany Hyde ‘19 talking about her experiences at Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
Bethany Hyde received her MBS degree in January 2019 and works at Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson, in the capacity of a senior analyst for the Data Sciences Team. Her team focuses on research and development (R&D) and they recently worked with a number of healthcare systems to identify patients who were at risk for developing Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) disease. Bethany and her team ultimately modeled a genetic matching technique that was 81% accurate in identifying patients’ likelihood of developing PAH. Bethany explained how her team used SQL for the back-end processes, AWS to host the data, and Python to resolve the problem. Bethany says that her background in systems engineering, her pitch project from the Applied AI from Concept to Market course, and the numerous presentations she made throughout her MBS courses helped her get where she is today.
Eric Sobolewski ’17 explaining the challenges he faced while implementing a geocoding API.
Eric Sobolewski, a data scientist at Bloomberg, relayed how his problem-solving skills were challenged when he was charged with resolving the geocode mapping of various manufacturing locations across the globe in order to ensure data quality control. His initial approach included using a geocoding Application Programming Interface (API), which was a failure as some locations in Japan returned codes in India due to similar location names. Eric and his team resolved this issue by restricting the location to Japan. He also explained how they used an Oracle database to generate recurring reports, Pandas, GeoPandas, SQL and APIs to resolve the data-related issues, and S3 for cloud object-storage—all concepts that are introduced in MBS courses. Eric also delved into the difference between a data scientist and a data analyst when asked by a student.
Craig Moran ’17 engaging students on what got him interested in the science of marketing.
Craig Moran, a member of the Rutgers Professional Science Master's Program’s Industrial Advisory Board, discussed how he switched from the clean energy industry to marketing sciences after obtaining his MBS degree. As a part of the Data Strategy Team at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness, he provided to potential clients new pitches and analytics solutions for growth opportunities through market research. He recently started working as a consultant for Marketing Evolution, where he is helping marketers to invest in media channels by integrating key performance indicators (KPIs) of digital action and machine-learning algorithms to forecast and make suggestions for media planning and budgeting. Marketing Evolution uses AWS for data storage of around 2 billion records for 3 months. He also recommended the Business Intelligence with Visual Analytics class, as it helped shape his visual analytic skills.
The QuaEra team presenting their insurance case study.
The evening ended with a presentation by QuaEra Insights, a data analytics consulting firm. The presenters, Gaurav Gupta, CEO and Founder, and Neil Dias, Senior Partner, explained their use cases in the insurance industry in relation to how they reduced underwriting time and costs by automating the review of medical documents. Harsha Reddy, a 2018 graduate of the MBS Program, works as a data scientist with this organization, and described his initial transition of joining the firm through a series of case studies to working on a FinTech client project in California during his first week of work.
Students enthralled to learn about Harsha Reddy’s experience at QuaEra.
It was an evening of great ideas shared among MBS students and alumni—among both growing and experienced analytical minds. Students were able to ask questions, learn about real-world experiences, network, and (of course) enjoy pizza and cookies. In summary, the event provided a new perspective to the students of the MBS program as they further their learning process in the MBS analytics concentration.