People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Yifei Wang earned her Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California San Diego in 2022 with a major in data science and a minor in economics. Through her undergraduate coursework in statistical theories, data structures, and programming, she grasped the fundamentals of analytics and built a solid technical foundation for her data science journey. Besides, Yifei completed several data-related internships during her undergraduate years, where she practiced applying theories to solve real-life problems and became more enthusiastic about a career in data science. To bridge the gap between the theories she learned in class and the real-life data-supported business scenarios, Yifei conducted several internships. During her internship at Didi Global, she worked as a data analyst to extract useful information from data. Her role was to generate weekly performance reports on car-hailing services and identify potential strategies for elevating the user retention rate by conducting A/B testing. She classified the drivers into four different groups: silent users, semi-active users, active users, and potential users, and then she assigned coupons, accordingly, encouraging drivers to become high-frequency users and take more pick-up orders. She also gained proficiency in Tableau and SQL queries and successfully boosted the user retention rate from 12% to 16% during three months. More recently, Yifei interned at Cummins China Investment Corporation as a financial development intern. She was responsible for automating the accounting process and cleaning historical financial data for further analysis. She grabbed every possible chance to learn the essentials of accounting and to match them with the right analytical process. She made good use of efficient business tools like Power BI to conduct basic calculations, data visualizations, and cross-validations. Both positions require that she implements efficient solutions to solve business problems, and she realized the importance of specialized knowledge and systematic training to capture real-life patterns, translate them into manageable datasets, and provide innovative solutions. Yifei is thrilled to attend the MSiA* program at Northwestern University to collaborate with brilliant peers and industry partners, learn about the latest trend in the analytics field, and expand her data science toolkit. She looks forward to becoming a data scientist and supporting business decisions with data-backed solutions.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
