People / Students / Class of 2025
Bo Zhao is a distinguished graduate from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Statistics with an outstanding GPA of 3.98. He consistently demonstrated academic excellence, earning a spot on the Dean’s List for several semesters. Bo's extensive technical skill set includes expertise in Python, R, SQL, and Microsoft Office. His proficiency in these tools is evident in the various complex projects he has undertaken. One of Bo's notable projects involved creating a database-centric web application to analyze 2015 flight delay and cancellation data. In this project, he designed an SQL relational database to centralize the data, performing intricate operations such as filtering, querying, and updating to ensure data precision. Bo enhanced the backend robustness and scalability using Java Spring Boot, developing APIs to facilitate real-time data transactions. He also designed user interfaces with HTML and CSS for effective data input and utilized Python with pandas for sophisticated data analysis. Additionally, Bo implemented data visualizations using D3.js and Chart.js and created a responsive frontend with ReactJS, ensuring a user-friendly experience. During his internship at Jingdong (JD), Bo served as a Data Analyst, where he collaborated closely with business teams to understand their specific data reporting needs. He used SQL to verify and pull data from databases and employed Python’s Pandas library for data cleaning and transformation. Bo's role required constructing complex SQL queries to meet the multi-dimensional and multi-metric demands of the business departments, processing raw data in Python to make it more query-friendly, and ensuring accurate and timely data reporting. Bo Zhao's future goal is to become a data scientist, where he plans to leverage his extensive technical expertise and analytical skills to drive innovative solutions in the data science field. He is excited about joining the Northwestern University Machine Learning and Data Science program, where he will not only learn data-related knowledge but also gain practical experience through collaborations with industry partners, familiarizing himself with real-world work scenarios.
