Yulia Mishkevich

I've lived many lives and worked in many industries before finding my path in marketing science. Five years ago, a friend told me about an opportunity at a tech analytics company that had an opening for an intern position. I applied, got accepted, and started as a summer intern for a few months. I was immediately offered a position and started as a senior analyst. At the same time, I was doing my PhD full-time at Pace University, so I was combining working in analytics with my doctoral studies. My growth was kind of slow during that period because I couldn't focus on taking on more responsibilities while managing both. Once I completed all the classes for my PhD, I joined full-time and started getting promoted and taking on more responsibility. Now I manage a team and work exclusively with one major government client, the U.S. Army. I do marketing mixed modeling and predictive analytics, managing several models that predict various KPIs. It's so different than just predicting sales for a company - we're predicting the number of people who want to join the army. We need to keep in mind a lot of different variables, including exogenous factors and macro events happening in the world, not only marketing. People might want to join because there's something happening globally, so we need to keep an eye on that and mind it. I mentor people to achieve the results we want to see, work with different partners who do marketing for the U.S. Army, gather data to analyze it, do forecasting and budget optimization. I manage a few people who do hands-on work, and I act as the main point of contact, quality checking their work and guiding them on new approaches, coming up with hypotheses. It's more technical and analytical. We present to the client as well, doing quarterly analysis where we build up the deck and present all the findings.