Senior Marketing Analyst Matthew Adesuyi Please describe what you love about working in this field. I love the feeling and impact of an-swering questions and solving complex problems using data. It feels like find-ing missing pieces to a puzzle. It feels wonderful to show professionals facts and help them make better decisions that are data-driven as opposed to making decisions based on gut feelings. I also love the feeling of improving the speed of processes and giving people access to useful data at their fingertips. What advice would you give someone looking to pursue this as a career? Johanna Fernandez Reservoir Engineer Johanna Fernandez Polly Mitchell-Guthrie PHOTOS: LEFT COURTESY OF POLLY MITCHELL-GUTHRIE; CENTER COURTESY OF MATTHEW ADESUYI;RIGHT COURTESY OF JOHANNA FERNANDEZ working in this field. I love the chance to apply analytical approaches to a wide range of questions and make an impact, from how can we identify our most loyal customers to how can we more accurately predict how much demand there will be for our product to how can we track endangered animals with noninvasive methods to increase their preservation. What advice would you give someone looking to pursue this as a career? Find a platform or program that has structure to build your foundation and provides resources to learn the funda-mentals on data analytics. Respect the process and learn consistently. Don’t focus only on the destination but also on the journey of self-improvement. You learn better by doing, so find a way to apply data analytics on the job. Lastly, find a community of like-minded individuals with similar passion where you can build and encourage each other. Please describe what you love about working in this field. Analytics is all about providing solutions in a creative way. It is not just running different algorithms to find the best mod-el; it is getting familiar with the informa-tion, finding insights from it, and provid-ing actionable results to increase profits and productivity in businesses. This field is so powerful that it represents a career itself, as well as the perfect combination with any existing professional path. It leverages the power of data to deepen analyses inherent to any discipline. What advice would you give someone looking to pursue this as a career? Just get started! This is a team sport, so all kinds of people can contribute, whether you are better at telling stories about results to communicate to stakeholders or gen-erating the analysis itself using advanced mathematical methods. Consider what kinds of questions you care about most and then find an organization who needs help getting those questions answered. n Matthew Adesuyi Everything is about data! The insights you are looking for are hidden in the numbers. Be curious, persistent, and creative. Even though you will have fun crunching the numbers and creating sophisticated models, you still must make sense of your results and translate your findings into actionable items. Never forget to speak the language of your clients and explain your journey as a story. Most importantly, have fun during the process! This career poses a lot of challenges, but the value it delivers will make it rewarding. FALL 2022 | Diversity in Action 57
Diversity in Action Fall 2022: Page 57
