‘Knowing By Doing’ Yields Career Opportunities
Senior Data Analyst, Glassdoor
Experience gained in an international digital marketing challenge and an internship gave Sharanya Sreenivasan the chance to hone her skills and take her career to the next level.
Sharanya Sreenivasan (M.S. MANL ’22)Courses that aligned with her career goals and the Chicago location were deciding factors for Sharanya Sreenivasan when she chose Stuart School of Business. “I wanted to take my understanding of marketing tools and technology to the next level,” she says. “The Stuart M.S. in Marketing Analytics program curriculum was exactly what I was looking for in terms of what I wanted to learn and the focus of my professional career. Plus, Chicago is a great city with diversity and culture.”
“I also like Illinois Tech’s philosophy of ‘knowing by doing’,” she says, “as we got ample opportunities to practice the concepts we learned [in courses] through live projects and assignments.”
Sreenivasan took the experiential approach to heart. She served as captain of a team of five Stuart students participating in the Google Nonprofit Marketing Immersion program, which matches university students with nonprofit organizations that need extra support with their Google Ad Grants accounts. The team’s digital campaigns for the Griffith Observatory Foundation in Los Angeles were so outstanding that the students received Google Ads Top Marketers recognition, placing their performance among the best out of thousands of students worldwide who participated in the challenge.
She also landed a nine-month internship as a sales operations analyst at Extreme Networks, where she utilized concepts and skills she was learning in her program. “I automated some of the forecasting and channel crediting processes using tools like Clari and RStudio,” says Sreenivasan, “and worked on building dashboards using Tableau and [Salesforce] to support the regional directors to track their funnel to maximize sales. Those projects helped the business eliminate redundancies and improve the efficiency of the processes to make informed data-driven decisions.”
The hands-on experience paid off. Soon after graduating from Stuart, Sreenivasan was hired at Glassdoor as a senior data analyst in the areas of data governance, analytics, and reporting.
“Stuart offers plenty of opportunities to network and a lot of value in the educational program,” she says. “The marketing analytics program opened a lot of opportunities for me to be successful in my professional career.”
- Learn more about the M.S. in Marketing Analytics program.