People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Yue Gao graduated Summa Cum Laude in May 2022 from Emory University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Quantitative Sciences. During her undergraduate studies, enamored by the potential and flexibility of data science, she started by taking relevant courses like data visualization, machine learning, and natural language processing and became fluent in analytical tools, including SQL, RStudio, Python, and JAVA. She also honed her ability to solve practical issues through projects in different domains, including lifetime value prediction, understock forecasting, and digital advertising effect analysis. From these projects, she witnessed the wide-ranging applications of data analytics and the benefits of leveraging data science to make intelligent decisions. Motivated by her enthusiasm, she participated in research in forecasting housing prices in Beijing, where she scraped 30,000 property selling records and built time series forecasting models with RStudio. She also optimized model performances by tuning hyperparameters and training with various rolling windows. Apart from academic projects, she was eager to apply what she had learned to solve real-world problems. During her internship at ByteDance, she employed an NLP model to analyze text data through keyword extraction and classification. These experiences enlightened her on the power of data-driven solutions. She was inspired to pursue further education in data analytics with the hope of becoming an expert in this field and bringing positive change to society. As an incoming student of Northwestern’s MSiA* program, she is excited to learn from industry leaders and collaborate with talented peers. In the future, she is also looking forward to tackling challenges together in this close-knit cohort and fully immersing in the learning-by-doing environment.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
