People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Ruoxuan (Michelle) Liu earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago with double majors in Economics (Data Science specialization) and Psychology in June 2022. Michelle first encountered data analysis when she worked as a user experience specialist for a project team in 2019. Her team aimed to strengthen the user experience of the university wellness center’s website, which was heavily underused due to its difficulty to navigate. To locate users’ pain points, she constructed usability testing procedures and collected data from campus participants. Her analysis of the data supported the building of three prototypes of improved web pages, one of which was eventually adopted by the webmaster of the wellness center. After this project, Michelle began to explore more in-depth the capacity of data analysis in solving real-world problems. Through her coursework and experience working as a research assistant for marketing professor Dr. Luxi Shen, Michelle gained proficiency in programming languages such as Python, SQL, and R. In the summer of 2021, she further developed her skill and passion in data analysis when she worked for the Ant Group. She encountered a dataset significantly more extensive and more complex than the ones in the school setting, but this did not deter her. She dissected the dataset by the types of customer behavior with SQL to better understand the structure and reported the descriptive summaries. She then built a customer profile report with Python by analyzing the records of overdue repayment in conjunction with several key behavior characteristics. Michelle’s analyses enabled the marketing department to effectively personalize advertisements and supported the risk management department with strategies for granting loans and reducing overdue payments. From this experience, she learned how to navigate large datasets, design solution-driven analyses, and generate recommendations and reports tailored toward a diverse audience. As an incoming student for the Northwestern MSiA* program, Michelle is excited about her journey ahead. She looks forward to further advancing her analysis and business skills through the industry practicum and capstone project. She cannot wait to meet people who share her passion for data-driven solutions to business problems. In her free time, Michelle enjoys visiting art museums, watching films, playing tennis, and immersing in videos of cats.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
