Dorcas Munoko, MQE Alum 2022
Dorcas (Dory) Munoko, graduated from the University of Pittsburgh’s MQE program in 2022. She completed her Capstone Project with Fourth Economy where her and a team of other MQE students analyzed COVID-19 related policies and their impact on economic and health outcomes in the United States at both state and county levels. Dory has just accepted a Data Analyst job offer with Liaison International Inc. Learn more about Dory below:
Q: How has the MQE Program provided you with the skills needed to succeed in your current position as a Data Analyst with Liaison International Inc?
The MQE program gave me an in-depth understanding of how to use data analytic tools like R and Python. It also gave me an opportunity to collect data, clean data, explore big data in meaningful ways, analyze data, interpret results, and communicate the results. These are the exact skills that I will apply in my new role as a Data Analyst with Liaison International Inc.
Q: What did you love learning about the most during your time in the MQE program?
I really loved the data-focused classes like Big Data and Forecasting, Economic Inference from Data, Applications of Economic Analysis and Techniques, Evidence-Based Analysis, and Data Design for Economic Applications. The main reasons behind this are my love of using data to make informed decisions, and the critical thinking and analytic skills I used to find meaning out of data. Finally, I also enjoyed the Communicating Economic Insights class because it enabled me to improve my communication skills, especially communicating analytic results to stakeholders.
Q: How did you implement skills from the MQE Program into your Capstone Project?
The skills I gained from my Economic Inference from Data and Big Data and Forecasting classes enabled me to effectively work on my capstone project. These include understanding the problem, setting an objective, collecting data, performing data wrangling, exploring the data, analyzing the data (which involved setting up difference-in-difference models to determine the causal relationship between COVID-19 related policies and economic and health outcomes in the United States at the state and county levels), interpreting the results, and effectively communicating the results to the client.
Q: How did the MQE program help prepare you for real-world job/career experience?
The MQE program played a great role in preparing me for a real-world job. My Capstone project and Big Data and Forecasting class provided me with real-world problems where I effectively analyzed data to find solutions to these problems. These gave me key data analytic skills that an analyst must have to be productive in the analytics field.