I’m Chinese, I am originally from China. I came to the US in 2013. I attended a Bachelor's program in the Weber State University. I graduated in 2016 and I took a gap year working in a retail company as accountant then I decided to go back to school for a Masters degree here at the university of Utah in 2017. I'm now in my second semester of the masters program.I've lived in China for about 18 years and for the rest of my life I stayed in Utah. For the first three years, I stayed in Austin and then I moved to Salt Lake City.I've been to snowboarding or skiing several times but I did not really enjoyed it. During my leisure time I really enjoy music, dance-maybe a little bit, but I don't really get a lot of chance to go down with my friends. I've always been thinking and planning about it- going to stadium somewhere to learn like Street dancing but don’t have the chance yet. I like eating and music, that's basically my life, don't have a lot of adventures to do during my leisure time.

This is my second semester and I have one more summer semester to go in summer of 2018. I’ve completed courses like Introduction to Business Analytics, here we basically learned introductory or entry level of knowledge regarding statistics and some mathematics. We would just touch base on some really premium regression methods like logistic regression and some statistic topic and then I had a course called predictive analytics which talked about our studio. In this program Master of Science in Business Analytics, we really heavily using our studio and we learned some really useful packages. This semester, I am having a course called database theory where we are taught some SQL knowledge, we have several lab where we are using live sequel where our professor assigns each team several projects to do and to complete sequel environment. I think SQL is so useful in the Analytics world.We are using SQL to extract data from those huge databases. I'm also having a data mining course this semester which talks about machine learning, algorithms and its like advance level statistics and analytic methods. In the summer, I will be having some courses called data visualization and we'll have in same course, I forgot the name, but in those courses we will learn about VBA language or Add ins in Excel like solver and something about financial things. Basically, we are using some macros or Add ins in Excel to solve optimization questions.The highlight in this program is the Capstone project. Each year some professors from the university will reach out to those Rio companies and they will work with our students and give us real hands on projects to do. This year, we're cooperating with overstock.com. It is like those E-commerce companies similar to Amazon.com. They have a huge data analytics team. They have scientists doing marketing or a customer analysis for them. This year, we're working on a project called the software fingerprinting. Basically, just like in visual level customer identification, the real database is huge, consists of over five hundred data tables and each table have over millions of rows of transaction records. We will be using the deterministic approach to promote the mass trade for customer identification. Then a probabilistic approach to try to predict the probability of a customer who will purchase on our website on the individual level. From that project we will really learn useful and practical experiences because we're working with a real company and with real data. We will complete it in two semesters, it is a huge project.

I switched my major little bit. Initially, I got a Bachelor in International Economics and minor in accounting. I definitely loved my professors and loved the bachelor programs but then, what I'm really interested and passionate about is the data analytics. In Accounting, I was in the entry level positions, sometimes we come up with a huge excel spreadsheet, where I feel like it’s kind of tedious and time consuming- that is data analysis using excel. Because at that time, I didn't know about the Add Ins. I don't I know anything about Studio and how to perform advanced level queries. I feel like I really want to know more and it really interests me. It's so mysterious and it seems like everyone's learning it. I found myself really obsessed with coding because it's not like something that everyone knows how to do. I found out the there's a new program at the University of Utah called Master of Science in the Business Analytics. I went through their curriculum and they have those really fancy courses that I really want to know about like learning those coding skills, learning how to deal with data analysis, so I switched my major little bit and finally decide to pursue a master's degree in Business Analytics.