How it all started
I was always fascinated with numbers, mainly in how they were used in relation to sports. That led me to take AP Statistics in high school and ever since then, I knew that this would be what I studied. I went to CUNY – Baruch College and started studying Statistics & Quantitative Modeling. While I was there, I figured out that what I love about statistics is how it led business leaders to make decisions.
Fine tuning a career path
In February 2020, I was a part of a 10-student cohort that got the opportunity to choose an internship opportunity from a pre-selected group of augmented-reality companies. One of those companies, 3DBear, had an opening as a Data Analyst Intern and that is where I decided to go. Weekly, I had to prepare reports on app user data and present it to the senior leadership team. From there, an open discussion would be had about why we were seeing certain trends. For example, one week, we saw a downward trend in usage. This was around the time that COVID-19 shut down schools and we came to the conclusion that this was the reason for the downward trend and started talking about potential changes that could be made to the app to accommodate for the fact that teachers, the main users of the app, had no reason to use the app any more. Ever since that internship, I knew that any job I had would need to be at the intersection of data and business decisions.
Juggling school and working
In December 2020/January 2021, I graduated with my Bachelor’s Degree in Statistics and Quantitative Modeling. I decided to go back to school and get my Master’s Degree in Business Analytics, with the intention of getting a better understanding of the different tools that would be used in a work environment. In addition to that, I started searching for an internship to help jumpstart my career. In October 2020, I got hired at Integral Ad Science, my current company, as a Sales Operations Intern. After 2 semesters of interning, I transitioned to a full-time role but on the Business Operations team. I knew it would be difficult working full-time and going to school full-time as well, but it would only be for one semester. After that one semester, in December 2022, I graduated with my Master’s Degree in Business Analytics.
Business Operations Associate
In May 2022, I started working full-time as a Business Operations Associate and our team sits in a unique part of the business. As a result, it feels like 2 days are never the same. I can do anything from managing quotas for Sales and Customer Success to building and managing a milestone tracker project for the Sales team. My favorite part of my job is where I get to flex my data muscles, whether that is working with Sales and Customer Success leads to build capacity dashboards or pulling data to do a productivity analysis of the business to see if our sales strategy is successful or needs tweaking.
Outside of Work
Outside of my career, I really enjoy different types of entertainment, my favorite being video games. Right now, I am plating some first-person shooters. Before I never liked those games but as I got older, I realized there are more to these games than just how well you can aim. There is strategy involved and that is when I enjoy the game the most.
Demir McRae 