People / Students / Class of 2027
Shihyun Park graduated from Yonsei University with a Bachelor of Science in Creative Technology Management, earning Honor Roll recognition. Studying management alongside Python, she gravitated toward hands-on courses where she could apply both. In her Undergraduate Directed Study course, she formed a team to tackle transportation accessibility, analyzing public datasets from the Seoul Metropolitan Government, such as low-floor bus and accessible taxi records. She then developed the work into Wheel-ing, a web-based barrier-free travel platform. She extended the project beyond the classroom into the university's social venture competition, where it was awarded a scholarship, and continued building her technical skills through repeated participation in venture programs throughout her undergraduate years.
Shihyun explored her interests in data and product through a series of internships, most notably six months at Amazon Web Services. At AWS, she analyzed and visualized sales data to track and forecast revenue, presenting insights at weekly business reviews. She also conducted in-depth research on the media and entertainment cloud market and developed strategic recommendations to accelerate sales. To apply these analytical skills to building products, she joined Naver Financial, one of Korea's leading fintech companies, at an early stage of its payment business. She spent five years as a product manager for online and offline payments, working closely with engineers, designers, and sales teams to launch new products. Under her leadership, the offline payment business grew to the point where its daily transaction volume in 2025 surpassed the total monthly volume of 2021, on a platform serving over 30 million users. Data remained central to how she led. In particular, when a proposal to replace a legacy system faced internal resistance, her SQL-based analysis of transaction, commission, and cost data brought stakeholders into alignment, and the year-long rebuild she led went on to increase the service's net profit margin by 45%.
Her professional experience taught her that to contribute more deeply, she needed to build and apply machine learning models herself. Through Northwestern's MLDS program, she aims to strengthen her technical competence in machine learning and data science, and to bring this expertise back to professional practice. Beyond data and products, she is a certified PADI diver who loves scuba diving and hiking, drawn to nature and adventure.
