Moving to San Francisco in 2019 and working as a bedside nurse during the COVID pandemic made me realize I needed a career change. The pandemic exposed me to systemic challenges in health care, including staffing shortages and inequitable access to resources. I became determined to contribute to the development of equitable products that are thoughtfully designed and deployed.

Fuqua’s Master of Science in Quantitative Management (MSQM) program provided the perfect opportunity for me to pivot and pursue a new career journey. Crucially, the program was flexible, allowing me to work full time while remotely attending classes and gaining new technical skills not taught in a traditional MBA. Just two weeks after graduation, I left the bedside to join a health care AI startup and leverage the combination of my recently acquired technical skills and health care background. More recently, my interest in AI research led me to join a personalized AI entertainment company, where I now work as a program manager on the research team.

My journey from bedside nurse to the tech industry was made possible by the professors, leaders, and support from the Duke community. I chose Fuqua for a few key reasons:

• The program’s flexibility allowed me to continue working full-time at UCSF Health as a nurse.
• The coursework was taught by Fuqua’s world-class professors.
• I knew the Duke network and brand would position me for success in my future career.

The Impact of Faculty Mentorship

Mentorship in the program is remarkable. The Fuqua faculty are extremely passionate and deeply invested in each student’s success and learning journey. I’ll share two key moments that highlight just how much the professors cared about my success.

During my first semester, I took Managerial Economics for Health Care with Professor Giuseppe “Pino” Lopomo. One day I emailed him about an economics problem I was stuck on. Instead of having to wait hours or days for a response from my professor, I received a phone call minutes later and Professor Lopomo provided an engaging discussion explaining the problem (heavily leveraging the Socratic method!).

In my Data Analytics and Applications course, our professor provided students with weekly office hours for personalized learning as we learned how to use Python for analytics. He was committed to teaching us Python and utilizing hands-on tools like Jupyter Notebook to derive business insights. Not only was he a dedicated professor but he was a great mentor, and we keep in touch. Outside of the classrooms, he’s provided me invaluable advice over the phone as I transitioned from clinician to an AI professional.

Data Analytics Skills for the Future

The Fuqua courses were truly cutting-edge. I’ll never forget learning about LLMs and building a tokenizer in Advanced Data Analytics and Applications before ChatGPT was released by OpenAI. And to be clear, I never learned any of this as a nurse or undergraduate student.

The MSQM program equipped me with essential data analytics skills that are highly valued in our data-driven world. I learned to code in R and Python, visualize data, and draw key insights from complex datasets.

In our courses, we tackled real-world case studies, building predictive models and classifiers to solve various business problems. For example, we built a model to predict future COVID-19 cases in North Carolina, which was a project that involved cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing large datasets. Furthermore, we explored machine learning concepts like supervised and unsupervised learning, further enriching my understanding of data analytics.

From Scrubs to Startups

The MSQM program at Duke is a transformative experience that equipped me with the skills, knowledge, and network to transition from nursing to cutting-edge AI startups. For anyone looking to expand their skill set, unlock new career possibilities, and connect with a vibrant network, I recommend exploring this program.