My passion is helping people solve problems. When I graduated with the MQM Class of 2020, I was searching for a job as the pandemic shut down pretty much everything. I was drawn to Home Depot because it offered support for problems faced by communities, including mask shortages. I was also impressed by the nature of the role I was being interviewed for as it directly utilized some of the skills I learned during my time at Fuqua.

Now I work as a data scientist at Home Depot, where I spend much of my day helping my colleagues solve complex marketing problems. My team’s insights help our partners within the company optimize our marketing efforts.

The fun part of my role as a data scientist involves talking with different people who have varying degrees of data literacy. Whether I’m working with an expert or someone very new to data analytics, it is crucial that I help them understand my analysis and recommendations. This requires using a lot of the skills I developed in the MQM program.

These courses were some of the most important:

1. Business Communication – As a data scientist, I am responsible for creating different presentations to make the data understandable to our partners, including audience strategy teams, media managers, data engineers, and more. But most importantly of all, I help my team craft a story to explain issues and opportunities. To do that, I rely on skills learned in the Business Communication course at Fuqua and my time spent working in teams.
2. Customer Relationship Management – Marketing is incomplete without having a thorough understanding of how customer acquisition and retention works and that is what this course taught me. Each campaign is categorized into different stages in a typical marketing funnel and is treated differently as the surrounding KPIs differ. CRM played a pivotal role in developing a solid understanding about these concepts.
3. Econometrics – To really understand the impact of different marketing models, an effective A/B test fluency is a necessary tool in a data scientist’s arsenal. Thanks to some of the concepts taught in Econometrics, I know more about the world of experimentation and understand how to identify true causal impact.

My current role is my third with Home Depot. I have risen in the ranks by being open to learning the function of other teams by networking and by creating a niche for myself. I spoke with Fuqua’s Admissions team about working as a data scientist, the culture at Home Depot, and lessons from my career journey. You can watch that interview here: