What is your educational background and how has it prepared you for this career?

Major: Economics. Minor: Entrepreneurship.

I did lots of coursework w/ math & science before because I wanted to be an engineer but decided not to.

SO I also did my first 2 years worth of chemistry, biology, physics, calculus I would say Economics trained me how to think. Mostly in terms of resources, analytical abilities, and translations/communication.

Resources: There is economics to everything in life.

Economics can be defined as the study of the use of scarce resources. And with this opens a whole world of possibilities.

Economics of: money, labor, time, etc. This concept is everywhere and really is the nature of how we interact on a daily basis. This is helpful to any job.

Analytical abilities: I learned how to use SAS & R from a couple classes while I was at school. And took lots of finance-related classes.

Having the mind and being trained to understand some type of programming language is more beneficial than even knowing the language itself – in my opinion.

It teaches you how to work with abstraction and manage complex situations with variables. This is valuable to any job.

Translations/Communication: I say this because much of economics is playing with the qualitative and quantitative.

Moving between the two. What do these statistics really mean for the situation? What is the context this data lives in? What value are we looking for so that X will be successful? Etc…

Explaining these things is both an art and a science.

That is very much the heart of being a Business Analyst. Not to glorify that position specifically. But, you tend to be the main problem solver on the team.

At least – that’s how it happens in my experience.

Otherwise: completing college, in general, was useful. I was not a natural student. Learning how to have the grit to complete your schoolwork well and move on – is immeasurably valuable.

GPA is mostly a game of effort and determination. NOT intelligence or ability.