What are my credentials?

Academic background:

  • Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Economics
  • Master’s in Marketing Analytics

Professional background:

I’ve been working in “marketing analytics” since 2007:

  • 2007-2009: Statistician (now it’s called Data Scientist) at a database marketing company. I worked with SAS to do two types of projects: (1) data wrangling (back then we called it: cleaning, processing and transforming) on big datasets (up to 300MM observations) that were used as my company’s data products; (2) predict consumer responses, classify/segment customers etc. to help improve our clients’ direct mail performance.
  • 2009-present (with intermission, see below): Various positions at various companies, but with primary focus on marketing mix modeling. I used SPSS for the most part to build lots of multiple regressions. But in this line of business visualization and communication of results are key, and Excel/Powerpoint are used extensively. Like it or not, Excel is an awesome tool for lots of different things.
  • 2012-2013: took a break from marketing mix modeling and worked at a digital agency in their consumer insights group. That’s were I learned a lot about digital media, campaign management and analysis. I used SQL to play with cookie-level data and do some cool deep dive analyses.

Self-education:

  • Coursera Data Science Specialization (using R): currently done with 7 out of 10 courses
  • Edx.org:
    • MITx 6.001x Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python (finished)
    • MITx 6.002x Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science (currently taking)
  • R for Data Science (book): slowly going through it to learn tidyverse

Athletic background:

  • Up until May 2014: None. I was a random gym goer at best.
  • May 2014: I started Strong Lifts 5×5, then switched to Starting Strength.
  • October 2014: my first powerlifting competition. That’s when I got hooked (placing first helped).
  • In total I competed 6 times (3x at a national level) at USAPL federation meets.
  • Best lifts (84kg class):
    • Squat: 331lb (150kg) April 2017 (I failed miserably with my squat at my latest competition in October…)
    • Bench: 193lb (87.5kg) October 2017
    • Deadlift: 386lb (175kg) October 2017
  • Current ranking in USAPL (with 407.5kg Total as of Oct 2017):
    • Raw Open division: #943 (among all female athletes in the US, standardized by Wilks Points)
    • Raw Open division 84kg: #84
    • Raw Open division 84kg New York State: #5