The Ceiling Buster

Milan McGraw (MSAI ‘21) changed his career path after he bumped his head on a ceiling – metaphorically speaking.   

It was late in the last decade, and McGraw already owned multiple advanced degrees and plentiful skills in data science. He’d built a successful start to his career at tech heavyweights such as Amazon and Groupon.  

But McGraw knew he had a problem: that metaphorical ceiling.  

“I realized I had a fundamental gap as I tried to accelerate my career as a data scientist to do somethingbigger,” he said. “All of the models and frameworks we’re using today – everything is about deep learning. Once I identified that need, I knew I had to go back to school.” 

He quickly discovered there was only one place he wanted to go to get the education he needed: Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) program.  

“This program is really focused on deep learning and artificial intelligence engineering,” McGraw said. “I could grow my deep-learning career or artificial-intelligence career, as opposed to being limited with only the data science skills that I had at the time.”  

Now a year clear of his MSAI graduation, McGraw has powered through that ceiling and found his way back to Amazon. He now works with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) team. His job is to help clients looking for automation solutions find the right piece or pieces from the AWS puzzle.  

Those pieces are indeed plentiful: there are more than 200 different ones to mix and match, all aimed at providing a company with greater efficiency and more profitability. The vast array of possible combinations makes matching the right ones to the right company all about education and effective two-way communication.  

“We spend a lot of time educating data science teams,” McGraw said. “What I like most is helping people understand what AI and machine learning are all about. Being able to articulate these ideas to the C suite, to the head of data science, all the way down to the entry-level stakeholders is really going to make you a much more effective operator.” 

That’s exactly what McGraw said MSAI did for him – make him a more effective professional and more capable master of AI/ML and the algorithms behind them. The skills he learned through the MSAI program helped turn him into an educator outside of his day job, too.  

McGraw teaches budding engineers and AI/ML specialists via FourthBrain, an online-education platform aimed specifically at those reaching for career growth in the fields where he has found so much satisfaction.  

“Our goal is to bridge the gap in the marketplace for folks who are trying to break into machine learning or artificial intelligence or machine learning operations,” McGraw said.   

Through his work with FourthBrain and his strong advocacy of the MSAI program with prospective students, McGraw encourages others to burst through the same ceiling he did.  

Plentiful options await, he said.  

“A lot of people think that the only job out there for an AI person coming out of (MSAI) is a machine learning engineer," he said. “That's false. There are so many different careers that AI supports. Having these core fundamental skills is going to open up tons of different doors.”