As a student of cognitive science and human biology, Claire Yoon, MM-A ‘22, has always been interested in finding patters.

But after a few years working at university labs, Yoon began looking to the private sector, where she hoped she could leverage her background to create new insights around customer behaviours and product trends.

She began working with CTV and with the Crave TV teams within Bell Media, where she studied digital content trends and worked on content-based insights analysis. While she was there, Yoon realized joining a masters program that could provide her with more business knowledge and deepen her understanding of statistics would be the best next step.

“I wanted to further accelerate my career, and I thought the MM-A would fit best because it would fill in a gap and allow me to have a stronger analytics background, as well as business knowledge I needed to grow in the corporate world,” says Yoon, former Senior Analyst, Marketing Analytics & Insights at Loblaw Digital.

She found was immediately able to apply learnings from the program to her job, especially given that she stepped into the job at Loblaw soon after starting the program.

“Having a clustering model, a production model, using linear regression – those are all things I wasn’t able to do much at my previous role,” she says.

“But during the MM-A, I was able to use those practical skills and knowledge in my job, and also rely on what I learned from the leadership courses to be more strategic when thinking about our customers.”

She’s also been able to work to bridge the communication gap between data scientists/developers and marketers with more of a business mindset.

“I always wanted to make sure that I communicated in the right way for those stakeholders, and that I had the tools and confidence to be more active in meetings,” Yoon says.

“The Case Study within Ivey really pushed me out of my comfort zone and made me become active in class discussions and debates – which was so different from my previous university experience, where I was in a lab or in a lecture-based class setting.”

Yoon says she and her classmates became close during the MM-A, partly because many shared a similar background and interest in data. They were able to discuss that shared interest and grow together as they learned to flex their business muscles.

“The program itself – and the technical and soft skills I was able to gain from it – was very valuable for me,” says Yoon.

“But so were the friends I met, and the bonds I was able to build with classmates who share career goals.”

*Update: As of December 2023, Claire Yoon has a new position: Lead, Customer Insights & Analytics at SSENSE