Every human being is created for a purpose. During my Junior year in high school; one weekend it dawned on me that following Monday in my computer lab. I wanted to write a program to find the day for a given date. I took the logic from my eighth-grade math book; wrote the code that weekend, and successfully executed it. Even today I have not forgotten the first sense of accomplishment from that basic programming language.
Today, I am applying for my Masters in Business Analytics which also involves applying mathematical principles to data to solve business problems. During my years in college, my passion for exploring always stayed by my side. I enrolled in evening computer courses at a private institution for multiple semesters. In my sixth semester at college, I was taking a Microprocessor course. I was challenged to demonstrate a four-way traffic controller by programming it in assembly language using an 8051 microcontroller.
Out of my twenty-one years in the IT industry, I have been a database administrator for fifteen years, supporting big data databases like Cassandra and Riak. One cannot separate a DBA from data; some mentionable points include using Perl scripts to load data from Legacy to Oracle and MSSQL. I wrote scripts to mask PCI and PII data while refreshing and extracting required user accounts matching the promotional campaign criteria.
My dream of studying analytics has been a passion for a long time. I took two courses a few years ago: Big Data on AWS and Data Analysis Boot Camp. The instructor’s portion of the demonstration was taken from predicting the survival rate in the Titanic problem from Kaggle which made me even more interested in studying Analytics and Big Data.
The Carlson School has consistently ranked among the nation’s top five programs for management information systems along with world-class scholars. The courses are designed with MIT, combining classroom and experiential learning to provide unique combinations of business knowledge, technical skills, and data analysis expertise. It is a unique blend of business acumen, data understanding, exposure to a diverse set of advanced analytics methods, and hands-on experience designed to help students such as myself apply knowledge on representative business problems making Carlson my top choice to pursue MSBA.
Today, I am proud to be a part of the support team of “bestbuy.com” ranked among the top ten websites in North America. We aim to ensure 99.999% site availability and are in the process of employing machine learning to detect problems before they impact our server. I will have the opportunity to work in the “Recommendation and Search Team” at BestBuy which uses analytics to improve customer satisfaction. I will also be able to leverage data to identify valuable business opportunities.
The course provides a way to accomplish my long-term goals of venturing into management with business courses such as financial accounting, operational management, and strategic management; it will also put me on a long-term career path. I can share over twenty years of knowledge of supporting Oracle, big data databases in AWS, data formats, performance, query tuning, and scripting. I will also bring my ten-year retail industry experience to the program.
Gartner predicts twenty-six to twenty-eight billion devices will be connected to IOT, and it is possible that IOT will diversify data sources and enable analytics to be applied to new areas, such as the monitoring of sensors attached to manufacturing devices. The world of analytics is ever-expanding, and I look forward to being a well-rounded analyst with a business twist.
