Outcomes

Data Science alumni from Washington and Lee University are making significant strides in diverse fields. Their work not only showcases their problem-solving expertise but also reflects the university’s commitment to fostering analytical excellence. Here are samples of what some of our alumni are doing now.

Cognitive & Behavioral Science, B.S.
Data Science, Minor
Poverty & Human Studies, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I am a product analyst at an event marketing and management software company. My role falls under the department of product management where I act as a Product Owner on a sprint team. I get to collaborate with a lot of different departments including program management, engineering, user research and design, sales, customer success, and product marketing throughout the discovery and delivery phases of the features I am responsible for, or rather “own.” In discovery, I review and analyze customer feedback and conduct competitor/industry research to identify problem spaces we want to focus our business resources on.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

As a product analyst, I am constantly having to back my decisions and conclusions about a problem or viable solution to stakeholders with data. Being able to tell a data-driven story and communicate these conclusions to diverse audiences is definitely a skill I practiced and developed in presenting my data science projects while obtaining the minor. The programming classes I took as part of the minor provided a foundation that helped me learn pretty quickly what it is the developers were talking about so our refinements were more efficient and I was able to ‘speak the language.’

My DS minor was particularly helpful during the interview process. The product managers were always impressed that I had a background in data science and wanted to hear more about what I was doing and what I had learned. I know now, too, being an employee of an established corporation, just how important using data is for them. Across every team I work with, everyone is always trying to incorporate ways for how we can make data-based decisions, so it is incredibly helpful to have a background in data science.

Cognitive & Behavioral Science, B.S.
Biology, Minor
Data Science, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I am a consultant at KPMG within the Forensic group. I conduct third-party investigations on behalf of our clients ranging from financial crimes, identifying grey market activity, and conducting intellectual property/royalty reviews. Most of the reviews are based on data provided to us by our client and third-party, so data science is really the heart of my job.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

Everything! But to be a little more specific:

  1. The ability how to ask valuable and important questions about data
  2. Knowing how to handle data in clean or messy formats and knowing how to get it into data that is ready to be analyzed
  3. SQL, R, and Python
  4. Annotations of analytics/code so others can follow my work
  5. Knowing how to present and communicate data results to both individuals with data backgrounds and those without data backgrounds.

I think a data science background can help any individual during the interview process. From mypersonal experience, talking about the hands-on projects I completed throughout the minor was really impactful to my interviewers because they were able to hear first-hand how I used my data skills (asking the right questions, wrangling the data, visualizing the data, presenting the data, and everything that comes in between). Being able to use real life examples of data I worked with and insights I found allowed the interviewers to see my strong foundation in data science.

Sociology & Anthropology, B.A.
Data Science, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I am working as a research intern with the Fines and Fees Initiative at Vera Institute of Justice. Beginning this September, I will spend the next year studying criminal justice as part of a graduate program at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland on a Fulbright grant.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

All of the DS courses that I took were extremely extremely helpful. At first, I’d mistakenly believed that the most important thing I got from my DS courses was the ability to wrangle data; however, now, looking back, I can definitely say that these courses were crucial to my growth because they taught me to prioritize understanding and working with the people behind the numbers and to embrace the complexity of the world when working on any research project- most answers to questions having to do with people aren’t going to be straightforward and there are always numerous confounders to take into account. Through taking the courses Business Analytics, Database Management for Business, and Data Mining for Business Analytics, I gained experience using R in a business context, which nicely complemented the skills I had from my sociology data science classes.

There are numerous tiny details here and there from all of my DS courses that I’ve taken with me to Vera. I’m enormously grateful for the inclusive, in-depth, and rigorous nature of the DS curriculum, and I really can’t emphasize that enough.

My DS minor definitely helped me get my current position. I would not have felt remotely prepared enough to work at Vera if I didn’t have as much experience working with data from all of my classes.

Through these classes, I have been able to really hone my ability to ask research questions that are worth exploring and produce data visualizations that effectively portray key findings.

Neuroscience, B.S.
Data Science, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I am currently a Research Assistant I at the Allen Institute for Brain Science. In this position, I work mainly with human and non-human primate tissue to identify, isolate, and sequence rare cell types in the brain. I have the amazing opportunity to work with all aspects of the scientific process, from what experiments to run to processing and interpreting the qualitative and quantitative results.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

Most of my current position involves “wet” lab work per se. However, the Data Science minor has not only given me the ability to analyze and understand the preliminary results of my experiments, but also a new perspective to troubleshoot and simplify my experiments. Just a few months ago, we received hundreds of tissue samples from a collaborator. Before we could begin any lab work, we had to incorporate the samples into our data collection system, each having unique characteristics. Immediately, I thought of implementing the data processing skills I had learned in the Data Science minor. Within a day I was able to wrangle several excel sheets worth of data into one usable, comprehensive list that will continue to aid us in further processing and comparison as we receive the results of our experiments.

I firmly believe the Data Science minor and the skills I learned aided me in getting my position. I was a more well-rounded applicant coming out of undergrad and I was passionate about applying what I had learned from the minor in my position. In fact, the position I have was technically a Research Assistant II position that I was not qualified for based on my years of experience. I believe that having the more extensive background that I did, in more than just lab work, was at least in part the reason they overlooked my inexperience and saw that I had valuable skills to contribute, especially in the current scientific environment.

Cognitive & Behavioral Science, B.S.
Data Science, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I started at Berkeley Research Group in the Health Analytics Practice as a consultant before transitioning to a software engineer role. My current role on the development team consists primarily of back-end work, creating services in Ruby to extract data from our web platform to perform various analytics and automate reporting metrics. Prior to beginning development work, I frequently wrote scripts in SQL and R to create client deliverables ranging from models to dashboards to comparative analyses using various healthcare-related data sets.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

The courses in the DS minor teach you not solely how to conduct data science techniques, but also how to articulate your findings. Additionally, the curriculum places an emphasis on learning how to adjust your communication style to best fit the level of understanding your audience has. My role requires me to articulate the technical ins and outs of various analyses and underlying data, as well as the implications the results may have. The DS minor equipped me with the tools to determine the most effective way to convey the methodology and results of an analysis regardless of the audience, which has helped me tremendously in my role.

The breadth and depth of data science techniques covered in the DS curriculum certainly helped me get my current position. The skills taught in the DS curriculum, particularly cleaning, transforming, and validating data, can be applied to any discipline and are extremely valued in the workforce. Many of the programming languages and statistical techniques taught in DS courses came up in interviews and on the job, and I was thoroughly prepared for this thanks to the DS minor.

Sociology & Anthropology, B.A.
Data Science, Minor
Mathematics, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I am a Data Analyst at The Data Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Data Center is a non-profit which brings together data about New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana from multiple sources to provide informed analyses and accessible information to government, businesses, nonprofits, and community leaders in the region. We report on population and demographics, the economy and workforce, New Orleans youth, and recovery and repopulation post-Hurricane Katrina, among other topics important to the metro area.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

Honestly, just dipping my toe in the water with multiple coding languages has been a huge help. At my job, I’ve had to use R, Python, and SQL to varying degrees, or at least have a vague understanding of them. I always have to re-orient myself, but I think it was really helpful that I have at least seen and done a little bit of analysis in all of these languages because that allows me to be more flexible in conversations with coworkers now. I do projects in both R and Python. I am also immensely grateful for the experience I had in statistics before I graduated, especially SOAN 218 - Basic Statistics for Social Scientists, SOAN 222 - Data Science Tools for Social Policy (my coworkers are very impressed by my introduction to these methods), MATH 309 - Probability, and MATH 222 - Linear Algebra. I think that these gave me the confidence and tools to be able to sit with online tutorials and technical papers to learn how to do new methods that I haven’t necessarily had previous exposure to.

Having Data Science as my minor in combination with a major was helpful to show that I have particular interest in a field (Sociology, in my case) and want to use data science methods in that field. At the end of your DS minor, collecting all the projects you’ve done over the years for your portfolio really does help. Specifically, describing the narrative about my personal progression and all the various projects I’d done with different methods helped me prepare for interviews.

Neuroscience, B.S.
Data Science, Minor

What is your current position and what do you do with it?

I am currently a third year medical student. I have also been actively engaged in various research projects within the fields of general surgery and anesthesia.

What from the DS minor curriculum helped you in your current job?

In my current role, I have been deeply involved in two research projects. The first project focuses on assessing the impact of factors such as tumor burden, distribution, predicted tumor dose, and curative therapy on clinical outcomes in hepatocellular carcinoma treated with yttrium-90. The second project involves conducting a cohort study to explore the correlation between the Obstetric-Specific Recovery Tool (ObsQor-10) and postpartum maternal outcomes. Both of these projects necessitate extensive quantitative analysis of substantial datasets. Furthermore, the first project specifically requires proficiency in 2D image analysis, a skill set that I had already acquired through my prior work with Dr. T. This prior experience equipped me with the necessary tools to effectively contribute to the image analysis component of the hepatocellular carcinoma project.

The quantitative analysis skills I had acquired during my previous courses and projects made me comfortable in handling complex analytical tasks and allowed me to contribute effectively to the data driven research projects that I am currently undertaking as a medical student. Also big shoutout to Dr. Toporikova whose unwavering dedication pushed me beyond my comfort zones and prompted me to explore various topics that I was unfamiliar with, which taught me the skills of asking the right questions and the abilities to answer those questions. My experience with her have allowed me to grow to become the person with desire to question and hope for answers.