Student/Alumni Profiles
Joe McCartney
Graduate Program – M.S. Data Science and Analytics, April 2019
Graduate Work Experience – Open Systems Technologies Internship, GVSU Charter Schools Graduate Assistantship
Undergraduate Program – B.S. in Statistics with an Emphasis in Actuarial Science and Minors in General Business, Mathematics, and Data Science (GVSU, Frederik Meijer Honors College), April 2017
Undergraduate Work Experience – Midway Products Internship, DTE Energy Internship, Priority Health Internship, Yazaki North America Internship, GVSU Statistics Department NSF Funded Research Project
Contact Info:
Hometown – Grosse Ile, MI
Email – [email protected]
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/joermccartney/
I chose Grand Valley State University after taking a tour of the campus and participating in the Frederik Meijer Honors College Scholarship Competition. The University provided a large school feel with social groups and events as well as a small school feel with individualized attention and support from faculty. After a total of six years at GVSU, this university was able to help me both learn and grow as a student and a person.
Throughout my undergraduate education, I excelled in my classes and had many opportunities to work in multiple industries as well as alongside other GVSU statistics faculty. All four of my undergraduate internships and my research project allowed me to use a large assortment of coding languages and software to perform different kinds of data analysis. My work in and out of the classroom positioned me to be awarded the Student Achievement Award from the Statistics Department in my final undergraduate year.
As I neared the end of my undergraduate program, I began to look for what my next step would be. I originally began job searching but some statistics professors I was close to from class and my research reached out to me about the idea of doing a Master’s Degree instead. At the time, the Data Science and Analytics program was still being created so I started in the Biostatistics program. The curriculum overlap allowed me to get all of my statistics courses out of the way before the Data Science and Analytics program was official started. After switching, I completed the remaining computer science courses. All of the courses I took were extremely engaging, thought provoking, and applicable to this evolving field. Through hard work and the support of my professors I was able to receive both a 4.0 GPA and the Graduate Dean's Citation for Academic Excellence in the Degree Program Award.
For my required internship of the PSM graduate program, I worked at the technological consulting firm Open Systems Technologies as a Business Intelligence Analyst and Data Scientist intern. During the summer I had the opportunity to work on many different projects for varying clients. The main project I worked on was building a data pipeline and algorithm for a recommendation system using Amazon Web Services to help a company better sell their products. This project and the internship were a great learning experience and application of the information I learned in my classes.
In the early spring of my last semester I interviewed at multiple companies and accepted a position at Mary Free Bed Rehabilitation Hospital. I was hired on as a Business Intelligence Developer Analyst. This position has many responsibilities including using Tableau to make dashboards to monitor patient data, using SQL to query and model data, and using R to analyze data with machine learning techniques. Overall, my experiences at both the undergraduate and graduate level at GVSU were extremely important in giving me the skills I needed and helping me prepare for my profession.
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