Pursuing a career in analytics
Alex Antic: What inspired you to pursue a career in analytics? Were there any pivotal moments or people throughout your career that made you take one path versus another? How have you found the transition to becoming a leader in the field?
Kathleen Maley: I would say, in my case, it was largely accidental.
My background is math; I have an undergraduate degree in pure math. I was teaching, and I stumbled across this opportunity to teach statistics, and it was really fun. I’d always thought about going back to graduate school, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I ended up going back and getting a master’s degree in applied statistics.
What I really wanted to do was join the Census Bureau. I was very interested in population study, but I had to move to Charlotte, North Carolina, and the census work that happens in Charlotte, North Carolina, is not the census work that somebody like me would be interested in doing. It’...