People / Students / Class of 2024
Jae Kum (Jackie) Kim graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019 with a major in Financial Actuarial Mathematics. During his junior year, he interned for UCLA Football, collecting data from athletes and providing insights based on their historical fitness performance during the off-season. This real-world experience ignited Jackie's interest in data beyond the insurance sector. Following two years of military service in South Korea, he began his career at GOBankingRates as a data analyst. During his time at GOBankingRates, Jackie worked closely with internal stakeholders to improve marketing decisions, enhance click-to-conversion rates, and meet key performance indicators for financial institution clients. He collaborated with data engineers to design and optimize ETL data pipelines and utilized SQL and Tableau to create insightful data visualizations. Notably, Jackie witnessed the negative consequences of a flawed machine-learning model implemented by a client, resulting in significant disruptions to business performance. To prevent further losses, his company had to pause the client's campaign. Intrigued by the impact of data science in the financial sector, Jackie pursued a certification in Applied Data Science from MIT Professional Education. His Capstone Project involved developing a classification model to predict loan defaults and minimize approval of high-risk applicants. This experience solidified Jackie's desire to become a data scientist and utilize his skills to make informed decisions and prevent similar setbacks in the future. Jackie is thrilled to join Northwestern University's M.S. in Machine Learning & Data Science program, where he will gain knowledge in advanced analytics and statistics that can be applied through the Practicum and Capstone Project. He looks forward to applying this knowledge during his internship and a subsequent full-time role as a data scientist, aiming to provide constructive analysis and apply robust machine-learning models to prevent situations similar to what his previous company's client had faced. Jackie is excited to contribute his expertise and make a meaningful impact by leveraging data science to drive positive outcomes in the field.
