People / Students / Class of 2024
Kira Luo graduated from New York University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Math and Economics, where her story with Data Science started. During college, she cultivated her proficiency in programming languages and machine learning. In school projects, she learned how to find the most suitable model via Python when predicting the median value of house prices in the Boston metropolitan area. After cleaning and standardizing the data, she explored different models to fit the dataset best. Besides, during her Dean’s Undergraduate Research focusing on how “missing women '' in the 1990s are related to the marriage rate nowadays in rural areas in China, she encountered the difficulty of the low accuracy rate of trained models. After troubleshooting, she realized that the high variation was caused by inappropriate data cleaning regarding missing data. She retried with predictions of missing data based on existing data patterns, which improved the accuracy significantly by 7%. Apart from a solid foundation in programming languages through coursework and research, she also has considerable real-world experience. She had internship experiences in 4A advertising agencies like IPG Mediabrands, finance industries like EY, and biotechnology companies like Pfizer, where she learned the charm of data science and how data could improve companies’ efficiency. During one of her internships in the finance industry, she transformed and categorized these raw data from questionnaires of customer feedback using Natural Language Processing packages inside Python based on the keywords. According to the results collected, she wrote algorithms to calculate their relative proportions, find the most important factors for each question and visualized the final report. Her report helped the company realize its top 2 problems and she gave an innovative suggestion of designing a Python algorithm that tracks the application status of the services offered by the company was adopted and planned to be put into production. After graduating from Northwestern’s MS in Machine Learning and Data Science, she wants to become a data scientist in Tech companies or Fintech companies. She wishes to become a senior data scientist using complex datasets to drive strategic decisions for companies in the near future.
