Building Skills in the Intersections: My Application Essay for Columbia University

This is the essay I submitted in my Application for Columbia Applied Analytics Master's Program. I like this essay because it summarizes how I found a niche I enjoyed early in my career, and how it empowered me to continue growing in it.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to being a person who knows exactly “what she wants to be when she grows up.” When you know from childhood that you want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or an astronaut, there is a clear path to follow. It may be a difficult journey, but the direction is clear, and the steps to achieve the career goal are evident. Personally, I’ve never been the person with a clear and singular career aspiration. Throughout my educational journey, I have developed a love of learning, and a curiosity that extends across many disciplines. When I began college and it came time to narrow my focus, the idea of choosing a single path, of narrowing the breadth of my interests to pursue the depth of a single subject, seemed difficult and daunting. I remember sitting in my freshman dorm room trying to map out my career path, and drawing lines leading in many different directions. My path forward seemed blurry and unfocused.

What I didn’t realize then is that my varied interests and skills could actually be one of my greatest professional strengths. Learning quickly, being adaptable and open-minded, and utilizing skills to break apart and address a wide variety of problems are all essential to succeeding in a career in business and technology. Pursuing an undergraduate degree in Intelligence Studies turned out to be the perfect fit to hone these skills. Through research, quantitative reasoning, writing, and presentation, I began to develop the skills of an analyst as I earned my degree. In the classroom, I also learned an important lesson: the purpose of analysis is to produce actionable insight to more effectively make decisions and solve problems. When I began my career after graduation as an analyst in IT, I was able to quickly see this lesson in practice in the real world. I saw how analysis that effectively utilizes data drives action and helps to solve business problems. I also saw many variations in analyst work. Analysts across the disciplines can perform very different types of work, but they utilize similar analytical frameworks and skills, all with the intention of transforming available information most effectively into actionable decisions and solutions to problems.

Working in this field, I feel I found my niche as an analyst, utilizing my varied skills and interests at the convergence of technology and business. Finally feeling like I have a direction, finally being a person who “knows what she wants to do,” I feel focused and motivated in this career path. My goals in continuing my education in analytics are to take my skills to the next level and learn approaches to problem solving that will produce practical, actionable results. This program uniquely provides the multifaceted, “both-and” approach to the field, an approach that fits me both personally and professionally. Specifically, I feel this program provides both the technical, data-driven skills that I seek to strengthen, and a focus on understanding the broader context to apply these skills in meaningful and actionable ways. Similarly, I am seeking a program in which I can develop both a strong foundational understanding of analytics in a theoretical sense, and also the ability to apply this understanding in practical ways. For these reasons, I am enthusiastically pursuing the online Masters of Science in Applied Analytics from Columbia University, and I hope you will consider me for admission to the program.