On Campus & Off Campus Leadership Practice
Illini Statistics Club
Vice President 2016-2017
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As an undergraduate student in statistics and economics, I was able to experience first-hand the beautiful marriage between financial concept and hard-data analysis. From extracting information from obscure datasets, to analyzing what the tallied results mean in the context of a portfolio’s investments, I have spent the bulk of the last four years understanding how numbers can often paint a better picture than words. The statistics side of my studies had a profound impact on my understanding of how practical mathematics can be in everyone’s daily lives. There was practically never a time that I thought the math taught in schools was actually useful beyond learning algebra. Statistics on the other hand, I was able to easily see how the simplest of principles governing chance and probability could be capitalized in just about any other field.
As the vice president in Illini Statisitics Club, I assisted in holding 7 weekly programming workshops (R, SAS and SQL) through year 2016-2017. I also helped connecting Illinois alumni or entrepreneur in related fields and invited them to make presentations on career planning as well as pursuing different learning areas in Statistics. It was a great time working together with people in the same learning area and we can easily find common topic and share our various ideas and perspectives. We hardly had conflicts in planning events. Not only I boosted my social work in the statistics field but enhanced time-management and teamwork skills as well.
Summer Internships
Bank of China, HK
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From my internship at the Bank of China, I have been able to develop a solid foundation in teamwork-bound problem-solving skills. While it is easy to sit behind the screen of my laptop, keying in variables and formulas to compute an analysis, it is a completely different exercise in professionalism to effectively lead a team. Some people may be natural-born leaders (or corporate sociopaths), the vast majority of us are not. I’d like to pursue my MBA to enhance my leadership skills even further before entering the workforce full time.
During the day in BOC, I worked alongside other team members in order to derive new means to promote the company’s investments to potential clients. Each member came from a variety background – marketing, finance – and I found myself tackling the team’s same goal from a different perspective. The marketing and finance guys wanted to highlight the successful rate of return of the previous projects, and while I agreed it was a good idea, I believed we could add a little more specification to the delivery. After normalizing the quarterly project data we had on the company’s projects from 2012 to 2016, I performed a binary classification by dividing our past projects into two cases (greater than or equal to 1,000,000RMB and less than 1,000,00RMB). Afterwards, I applied different training methods including LDA, QDA, NB, KNN, single Decision Tree and Random Forest to come to the conclusion that there were primarily two different groups of clients, and therefore we developed two separate marketing strategies for maximum appeal.
While there was no way to tell how much numerical value my analysis brought to the company, as well as the clients that were ultimately persuaded, I experienced tremendous satisfaction in being able to provide a sharper resolution that resulted in positive real-world outcomes in a team environment – and this is a high that I can most assuredly get accustomed to.