My story

I started college thinking I’d major in political science or economics, but neither held my attention the way I expected. In the end, a less obvious pair stood out: Peace, War, and Defense, and Psychology. They sound unrelated. They aren't.

Both are fundamentally about how decisions get made: by individuals, by institutions, under pressure, with bad information. That's the question I've kept following, and it eventually pulled me toward data and analytics, where decisions are influenced at a far greater scale.

In May 2022, I joined a propaganda research team at UNC, grading Chinese state propaganda on production quality and persuasive choices to track how foreign state messaging was evolving.

Our team also did data labeling for ExTrac, an AI threat intelligence platform. Early on, the co-founder walked us through how our work would shape the platform. That was the turning point. The next semester, while studying abroad at the University of Sydney, I took my first data science course and added a minor in Data Science shortly after.

The summer of 2023 I joined NetApp's global safety and security team as an intern. The role had two phases.

First, program assessment: working under the global director, I evaluated NetApp's corporate intelligence program and the feasibility of building out proactive capabilities. I talked with practitioners at peer companies and consultancies, then sat down with NetApp's regional security managers to understand their focus. The deliverable was a benchmarking analysis.

Second, analytics: I was extended two months to build a natural hazard risk dashboard and report for continuity planning, merging FEMA's National Risk Index with internal personnel and facilities data in SQL and surfacing it in a Power BI dashboard.

After graduation I joined Bank of America as an embedded analyst on their research and event monitoring team. The day-to-day was triage: alerts came in across various platforms, and the question was always, does this matter, and to whom. When the answer was yes, a report shipped fast, combining OSINT research with internal data on employees, operations, or travel to quantify impact.

The side project I'm proudest of: aggregating our internal ATM crime data into a format that was shared with peer banks and law enforcement bi-weekly. That data-related work, where the deliverable was a clean dataset other people would build on, reaffirmed where I wanted to go next.

I left Bank of America in June 2025 to start the MS in Analytics at NC State's Institute for Advanced Analytics, a ten-month sprint through statistics, machine learning, time series, survival analysis, financial and marketing analytics, cloud computing, and applied AI, plus an eight-month practicum with a real company. In my case, Primrose Schools.

For the practicum, my team helped Primrose understand how demographic shifts at the market and neighborhood level affect franchise enrollment and performance. I worked on geospatial data sourcing, panel regression modeling, and a dashboard that lets users explore demographic trends and their impact.

I graduated in May 2026 and I'm looking for analytics or data work where the analysis has somewhere to go: a decision, a forecast, a recommendation, a model someone uses. That's been the through-line from intelligence work to here, and it's what I want to keep doing.

Outside of work, I enjoy reading, getting outdoors, and live music.

I read mostly fantasy and sci-fi — fully caught up on Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series — but have been working through more classics lately, currently Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Most of my travel has been outdoor-focused: some highlights are a two-week road trip across 14 states and 4 national parks after undergrad, and a van trip across the South Island of New Zealand (think Lord of the Rings) during my semester in Sydney.

For music, I enjoy almost anything in-person, but my favorite was Jack Johnson outside the Sydney Opera House. I was also fortunate to see many artists, such as Bruno Mars, while working as event staff at the Allianz Arena in Sydney, which also exposed me to some cool sporting events across the AFL, NRL, and ICC Men's T20 World Cup.