Current Position:

Workforce Data Analyst at Ballad Health

Degree (s):

• Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Statistics, NC State, May 2015
• Master of Science in Statistics, NC State, 2021

Questions below were answered by Jackie, while she was in her previous position as a Planning Analyst at Ballad Health.

Was the degree you earned required for the work you do? How did you find yourself in your current position?

Not at all! One of my favorite parts of the position I currently work in is that everyone comes from a different background. I have coworkers with business backgrounds, public health backgrounds, computer science backgrounds, and healthcare administration backgrounds. Having a team of people with different experiences has helped me to learn a lot about my industry, but also help the team to approach problems from multiple different angles.

During college and through my internships in college, I discovered what I really liked about math and statistics was data and data analytics. When I was looking for jobs, I looked for jobs that had some aspect of data analysis. This led me to looking at jobs in many different industries, as everyone has data! I ended up in the healthcare industry because it mixed my personal passion of helping others with my professional passion of data analysis.

What skills or abilities do you find are most important in the work you do?

The most important thing in the work I do is being a fast learner and being willing to continue to learn. Most industries are constantly changing, so it is very important to keep up to date on the changing of the industry and also to learn from your coworkers with more experience than you. I also find it important to have a good balance between the hard technical skills and the softer personable skills such as public speaking. It is a great thing to be able to find a solution or find something neat in a data set, but it is even more important to be able to articulate your findings to others and be an overall personable worker.

What preparation would you recommend for someone interested in entering your field? Are there any courses at State you would recommend?

Definitely get as many summer internships as you can, get experience working in a professional setting, and learn what you like about each job. While at state I would definitely recommend taking classes outside of math. The math program makes it really easy to add a minor or another major and still be able to graduate on time. A statistics major/minor fits really well and the knowledge gained in these classes is a great supplement to the skills learned with a math major.

What other career paths would you suggest a student explore before making a final decision?

With a math degree, you aren’t as much learning the hard technical skills as you are learning a way of thinking and learning to become a problem solver, so it can be kind of difficult to figure out what industry you want to go into. I would suggest looking at job descriptions for any role requiring a “technical degree”. Most of these will be analyst roles and will be in many different industries, then looking into the industry and what people do in that industry to see if it is a place you could work in and thrive in.

If you had to do everything over again, would you do anything differently? Why or why not?

I think I would have tried to explore more internships in different industries. My first internship was in banking, which led to my first full-time job at the same company. I took that job mostly because I didn’t want to have to search for jobs while finishing up school. I ended up not enjoying that job, and not enjoying the industry as a whole. I knew at the end of my internship that I did not want to work in banking for the rest of my life. Looking back, I wish I would have tried some other industries before jumping into a job.