What can I do with a QSS degree?

After graduating in 2024, I began working at Alvarez & Marsal in the Global Transaction Analytics (GTA) group. As my QSS major concentrated in Economics, I wanted to find a job where I could utilize the skills I learned through the major and apply them in a business context. The GTA team works with private equity firms and corporations to provide analytics as a service. My job, in simplest terms, is to use data to tell the commercial story of a company. Though most data I initially receive is messy and incomplete, the skills I learned in QSS 20 help me clean and analyze these data. As a project develops, I lean on the foundations I built in QSS 17 when creating visualizations that clearly and dynamically express business insights. Like the major I designed, my work lies at the intersection of data and markets. I am incredibly grateful to Dartmouth and the QSS program for preparing me with the skills I need as I head into my career.

(9/4/24)

My junior summer, I was hired as an intern at FreshAir Sensor in Lebanon, NH, working with several Dartmouth alumni and professors. I spent 10 weeks applying the knowledge from my QSS courses – working with the company's ERP & CRM software, cleaning data for API connections, and using the skills I picked up in my foundational QSS courses to create reports for the senior executive team. I continued my internship part-time throughout my senior year and made the transition to the full-time team shortly after graduation. Now, my day-to-day consists of ERP & CRM software administration, prototyping client-facing data reports, and more. 

It's because of my QSS education that I get to take on new projects right from our senior team that challenge me to critically define problems and outline data-driven solutions. The variety of applied data skills I gained through the QSS program means my role at FreshAir will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future, which makes every day different and exciting.

Outside of my full-time job, I use the research and expertise I developed while writing my thesis (a game-theoretic approach to the theater industry) and other papers in my economic game theory focus as an independent theatre data analyst: I help small theaters better understand their audience and identify patterns in their data. My goal is to make the business aspects of running a theater easier for the kinds of theatres that made me the person I am today. 

Coming into Dartmouth, I knew I wanted a career exploring theater, entrepreneurship, and technology. As a graduate, my QSS major has helped make this a reality

(9/3/24)

Following my graduation from Dartmouth in 2024, I joined the Anthropology department as a post-baccalaureate research scholar. Over the course of this one-year position, I will build on the skills I gained in my anthropology coursework as a QSS major with a concentration in cultural anthropology. Additionally, I will work to integrate many of the quantitative methods I learned through my QSS coursework into research design within the program. By leveraging mixed methods in this way, I bring a unique quantitative lens to the mostly qualitatively trained team. Furthermore, the work I completed through the senior honors thesis program in the QSS program has served as a launchpad for my own research in this position. This year, I will work to expand that research project and explore similar topics related to health behaviors and rural communities, which formed the core of my thesis inquiry. 
(8/20/24)

I am a Dartmouth '23, and I majored in Quantitative Social Sciences and minored in Digital Arts. Currently, I'm pursuing a Master's in Business Analytics at MIT. The QSS curriculum at Dartmouth was pivotal in sparking my love for data and analytics. Courses like QSS 20: Modern Statistical Computing and QSS 17: Data Visualization were particularly influential, as well as my senior honors thesis research project where I got to deep dive into applying analytical methods to my other interests in healthcare and policy. The QSS coursework laid the foundation for my daily use of R and Python, and my career aspirations of becoming a data scientist!
(4/18/24)

I'm currently a Data Scientist at Apple on the Cloud Infrastructure Business Organization team, where I help analyze compute and storage infrastructure. I regularly use R and apply the skills from my QSS data visualization class to present data in a beautiful, digestible format. Prior to my current role, I worked as the Lead Data Scientist/Researcher at a media start-up called Protocol, where I helped write data journalism pieces and conducted analyses of China's technology industry. I also worked on the Biden 2020 presidential campaign as a data scientist and was previously a Senior Applied Data Scientist at Civis Analytics on the political and healthcare teams. Across all of these roles, ranging across different industries and domains, I've been able to leverage skills I learned from my QSS classes. I am immensely grateful to my professors at Dartmouth for passing on their valuable knowledge.
(3/20/24)

After graduating, I began working as the Director of Process Improvement & Sustainable Energy Initiatives at Lane Valente Industries. My role consists of helping the company grow both internally and externally as we help companies nationwide develop electric vehicle charging infrastructure for their customers and vehicle fleets. Currently, I am focusing on standardizing our workflow at a national level, modeling our potential for future growth, as well as exploring new business opportunities in the sustainable energy space. The QSS major allowed me to explore my passion for clean energy while gaining the skills necessary to help the company integrate more quantitative analysis into their everyday operations.

I recently joined the predictive analytics startup DashlyHR as a founding engineer. We are currently part of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator in NYC, developing our platform focusing on predictive analytics for construction workforce data to minimize risk and regrettable turnover within the industry. The quantitative skills I developed as a QSS major have been crucial to the work I'm doing now, which incorporates a blend of Python, R, and SQL. Right now, I'm building out the machine learning models that are at the heart of our predictive analytics. It's exciting to apply the data analysis and visualization skills I learned in my QSS courses, especially in the collaborative environment of an early-stage startup.

Zach is an Engineering Lead at AngelList, which helps startups raise money and makes it easy to invest in private markets. He lives in DC with his wife Jessie Anderson '18.

I now work as a Data Analyst for DraftKings in Boston. My day to day role requires drawing insights from large amounts of data, a skill that I developed through my QSS major at Dartmouth. Particularly, the technical skills that I learned in  Data Visualization (QSS 17) have proven incredibly useful. Much of my current role requires creating views and dashboards that present business data to key stakeholders within the company, and the coursework in QSS 17 helped prepare me for visualizing data in an accurate, easily interpretable, and visually pleasing manner. My role has also included a number of long-term, open-ended projects where I've investigated potential hypotheses to various business problems. The numerous data-driven projects that I completed in QSS classes at Dartmouth prepared me well for this aspect of the job, both in terms of the analytical problem solving skills needed to approach the problem and the technical skills needed to work with the data.

Since graduating, I started work at Oak Street Health, a Chicago-based primary care company for older adults on Medicare. I'm part of the analytics and insights team within the patient experience arm of the business. In my role, I conduct analyses on experiential data and synthesize those results for business leaders as they steer Oak Street Health towards becoming a leader in value-based healthcare. My coursework as part of the QSS major has definitely prepared me to hit the ground running with an analytical thinking process and statistical gaze. The flexibility of the QSS major allowed me to focus on a combination of social science courses surrounding the healthcare system, and it has made me very comfortable with working at the crossroads of analytics and patient experience.

I'm a journalist covering education for the Associated Press. I rely on the quantitative data skills I learned in QSS to understand and write about the policy choices schools make and their impact on kids. Being able to understand the data that educators are relying on helps me write more clearly and authoritatively for a global audience. Because of the AP's wide reach in elections and polling, I have also been able to use my statistics and analysis skills in stories about public opinion and politics based on the data from those projects.

I'm on the carbon data team at Watershed, a startup that helps companies like Airbnb and Everlane measure and act on their carbon emissions. In practice, this means I look at a lot of business data, write SQL code to standardize it, and interpret the resulting carbon footprints. I'm grateful for the QSS program for giving me the data computation skills to get a foothold in industry at Mastercard, from which I was able to jump to doing work that matters to me at Watershed.

I work at Kantar, based in the Boston office, doing Market Research Consulting. My day-to-day work includes designing surveys, fielding data, and analyzing consumer insights for B2B and B2C businesses. Our purpose is to derive meaningful insights that help our clients develop products, devise new strategies, or monitor and improve their brand's health/reputation. What I learned through the QSS department prepared me well for a career in conducting research and analyzing data to have a material impact on businesses' and the strategies they employ. This work allows me to utilize the range of problem-solving and analytical skills I learned throughout my time at Dartmouth.

I now work a full-time position as a business analyst with Cicero Group in Washington, D.C. after interning with the company last summer in Salt Lake City. In my position, I conduct research and synthesize the results, work with client data, and work directly with clients. I'm constantly learning, but I have a foundation for all of these skills because of my QSS degree, which not only exposed me to a wide range of data analytic and research techniques, but also taught me how to convey the findings in a compelling way. My focus on psychology and sociology within the major also taught me valuable lessons about working with people, understanding their concerns, and figuring out the best way to help. QSS is a flexible major, and I've found that it's left me with the ability to be open-minded and adaptable in my career as well.

After graduation I started working at Stanford's Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab). At the RegLab I study the ways that the government deploys machine learning and artificial intelligence to decide how benefits and burdens are distributed in society. In particular, my work studies how racial disparities arise in the algorithmic selection of IRS audits. My work builds directly on my experiences as a QSS student, from the data visualization skills and statistical reasoning abilities I gained in my coursework to the analytical practice I gained doing research with QSS faculty.

I work as a Policy & Research Associate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab based in the Department of Economics at MIT. J-PAL North America conducts randomized evaluations, builds partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helps partners scale up effective programs. Our work spans a wide range of sectors including health care, housing, criminal justice, education, and economic mobility. In my role, I provide technical assistance to implementing partners to increase their capacity for evaluation, synthesize and disseminate research findings for non-academic audiences, and support a large network of J-PAL affiliated researchers as they seek to answer policy-relevant research questions. My QSS experience has been crucial to my work; I am able to leverage my deep understanding of social science research methods, data collection, and analysis in my work every day. 

I recently began law school at Boston University School of Law, joining the class of 2026. As a QSS major, I was interested in how quantitative research methods can shed light on systemic issues often looked at through qualitative lenses, something I examined in my honors thesis on perceptions of fairness in jury trials. I plan on pursuing a career in public interest law, and hope to continue using quantitative data to make new legal arguments and promote evidence-driven solutions to injustice in the American justice system.

This past summer, I interned at Sotheby's in New York City, as part of the Streetwear and Modern Collectibles team. Over 10 weeks, I contributed to post-sale processes for an auction celebrating the Nike Air Force 1's 40th anniversary and helped prepare for an auction spotlighting Michael Jordan's 1998 NBA Finals Game 1 jersey, which sold for $10.1 million. My QSS major enabled me to excel in data-driven tasks, ranging from social media analysis for engagement growth to data wrangling for comprehensive sales reports. Next year, I will continue to leverage my QSS degree as I join Altman Solon, a TMT strategy consulting firm, building both quantitative and business skills that I hope to later apply in the art world.

After earning a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University, I now work as an Analyst on Congress and the Legislative Process at the Congressional Research Service. In both graduate school and my current job, I constantly utilize the research skills and critical thinking I developed as a QSS major. From Quantitative Political Analysis (GOVT 10) to Sports Analytics (QSS 30.01) to Major Thesis Research (QSS 81), every QSS class gave me a new way to think about the world. More than anything, I learned how to tackle uncertainty and evaluate the quality of evidence presented to me. Thank you to all of the awesome QSS faculty for your support, dedication, and incredible insight!

For the past year, I have been working at Goldman Sachs as part of their Market Risk team. Our job is to quantify potential losses that can occur under different economic scenarios and ensure that the firm is not exposed to outsized losses when markets move against its positioning. My job combines both macroeconomics with technical skills which is at the heart of the QSS program. The interdisciplinary nature of the curriculum prepared me to think critically about the drivers of financial markets, strengthened my technical skills to efficiently analyze data, and gave me a framework to effectively present and communicate my findings to my team.  

In July 2023, I joined Parthenon Capital in Boston as a Private Equity Analyst. I'm responsible for helping source and execute middle market transactions within the healthcare and financial services sectors. On the job, I use both qualitative and quantitative skills during the investment process. Many of the problems I solve on a day to day basis are applicable to concepts and problem solving skills I learned during my time as a QSS minor. To name a few: I regularly deploy statistical models when analyzing company-level financial data, construct buyout models, and implement business process improvement that is informed by common statistical models and theories. 

In 2021, I joined LoudCrowd, a rapidly growing marketing SaaS start-up in Austin, Texas. LoudCrowd helps brands grow their presence on social media and earn more revenue out of their content creators. I report to the CEO on a number of different growth initiatives, many of which involve both quantitative and qualitative approaches to problem solving. QSS has enabled me to approach data (i.e. website SEO data, client retention numbers, sales funnel projections) and craft actionable solutions to enable accelerated growth. As one of the only employees with a rigorous background in quantitative reasoning (thanks to QSS), I have become an invaluable asset to the amazing team at LoudCrowd.

Shortly after graduating, I started my career in the Baltimore Orioles' front office as their Baseball Operations Strategist. In this position, I work with people across all baseball departments, including scouting, analytics, and player development. My primary responsibilities include providing my input on roster moves, player evaluation, and ensuring our compliance with Major League rules. My QSS degree has proven to be quite beneficial to my work with the Orioles. Through the major, I gained a deeper understanding of the statistics that underlie team decisions and also developed the necessary technical skills to perform in this role. I would highly recommend QSS 17 (Data Visualization), QSS 20 (Modern Statistical Computing), and, of course, President Hanlon and Professor Herron's QSS 30.01 (Sports Analytics) to any prospective QSS major who may be interested in embarking on a career in sports.

I am working at Trinity Life Sciences in NYC next year! It's a healthcare consulting firm that I worked at last summer and really enjoyed. The work combines quantitative skills with healthcare and science knowledge in a really interesting way. I absolutely feel like the QSS major has prepared me well for this job because it has given me the quantitative skill I need, and my QSS concentration was in global health, so I was also already working with data in the healthcare space in my research projects.

As an Investment Analyst at Ludwig Cancer Research, I harness a unique blend of analytical technique and creative insight to manage and grow a $2 billion endowment for the non-profit foundation. My role entails rigorous analysis of financial data, modeling potential investments, and guiding capital allocation, aiming to maximize the endowment's impact on groundbreaking cancer research. Simultaneously, I leverage my leadership skills and personal experience with Crohn's disease to serve on the Young Professionals' Committee of the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation's NY Chapter, striving to support others with similar challenges. My Quantitative Social Science (QSS) training proves invaluable, equipping me with the ability to dissect complex data and inform strategy in both personal and professional realms. 

This past October, I joined McKinsey & Company in Denver, Colorado, as a business analyst. My work at McKinsey involves assisting businesses, governments, and non-profit organizations in solving complex problems, improving performance, and driving growth across all industries. So far, my QSS experience has been extremely helpful in my daily work from wrangling messy client data to drawing performance insights using many of the statistical methods I learned during my QSS thesis and classes. Moreover, the QSS major has equipped me with the skills to effectively communicate these insights to both my team and clients.

This past August, I joined the Greka Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA. Since its founding in 2004, the Broad has accelerated biomedical research and helped improve human health through its commitment to identify the root biological causes of disease and find new opportunities for therapeutic intervention. As a QSS major, I became interested in quantitative methods (statistics / machine learning) and their application to understand many different fields – including population health, genetics, and biology. In my current role as a Research Associate, I apply these quantitative frameworks to analyze data and investigate the mechanisms underlying rare genetic diseases.

I am the Director of Business Development at TekRefurbs, an IT refurbishing and recycling firm. My family started the company back in 2005, and my QSS degree has helped me bring the business into the 21st century. In my time at the company, I have helped automate our online pricing and inventory management systems, saving thousands of working hours a year. I have also helped us implement a new bulk purchasing method using "regular expressions" in R and Google Sheets, which helps us minimize errors in our supply chain. These are all tasks that I wouldn't have been able to accomplish without my QSS background. QSS gave me the tools to not only evaluate large data sets with ease, but also to actualize the outputs of those data sets for my business. Additionally, the social science classes I took within QSS prepared me well for my role. The public policy classes I took through QSS gave me strong writing and speaking skills, which allowed me to manage multiple teams from Day 1. I am grateful for the combination of analytics and management skills I learned in the QSS program.

I'm a Business Analyst at MarketBridge. I just started this summer, and I felt that my time learning how to conduct quantitative research in the QSS department really helped with an analytical job like mine. In particular, QSS 015 was my first foray into R and RStudio, which I use on a daily basis at my current job for tidying and exploring client data. I also really appreciated the data visualization course which I use to present my findings to clients and management. It's also the course that got me interested in data science work!

I currently work in marketing effectiveness projects, meaning I use econometric models to assess the efficacy of different levels of marketing spending on different outcomes like conversions or new contracts. We pride ourselves on providing quantitatively-based solutions to clients with solid statistical reasoning, and I'm grateful for the opportunities that the QSS department opened up for me.

Starting in September, I will be joining The D.E. Shaw Group as a Corporate Development Associate. The Corporate Development team develops firm strategy, seeking to identify new investment opportunities, expand the scope of existing strategies, and package and sell investment expertise. As an associate, I will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to research and implement new investment approaches. I will have the chance to apply my skills in rigorous, analytical problem solving that I developed as a QSS major. 

This fall, I will be starting my Ph.D. in political science at Stanford University. I was also selected as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, an opportunity that I would not have without the close mentorship of QSS faculty. While at Dartmouth, I've especially enjoyed QSS courses' small class sizes, statistics instruction, and emphasis on hands-on projects. Thanks to the program, I was also able to conduct my own survey experiment and write a senior thesis about changing race relations in our country, the research interest that first motivated me to pursue graduate study.

I will be working as an Investment Banking Analyst at Shea & Company in Boston, MA. Shea focuses on middle-market high growth enterprise software M&A and buy-side transactions. In this role, I will be able to utilize my QSS background in data visualization (QSS 17) and my knowledge of the power of data science to identify strong tech companies to work alongside with.

I will be working as a Business Analyst at Public Consulting Group on the Education Strategies team in Boston. The Education Strategies team works with districts and state education agencies to identify problems and deliver solutions to improve education systems across the country. In this role, I will have the opportunity to utilize my QSS background, particularly my knowledge from QSS 17, QSS 20 and QSS 54 to help the team make data-driven decisions and recommendations. 

For as long as I can remember, I've looked forward to a career in medicine. So, next fall, I'm excited to begin my medical education at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine. While I'm unsure where exactly this path will take me, I hope to one day practice in an academic setting—learning, teaching, and caring for patients. 

Starting in August, I will be joining Citadel Securities as a fundamental analyst. I interned with the firm last summer, performing a variety of duties relating to market analysis and trading pitches. I am happy to be returning to the same team. I will have opportunities to apply the quantitative skills from Dartmouth QSS classes to analyze financial markets data and make trading decisions. 

After a brief stint at a music/tech startup, I now work in A&R (Artists and Repertoire) at Atlantic Records with an emphasis on quantitative research, analysis and evaluation of both new potential signings and existing artists on the roster. The QSS degree has been invaluable to my journey in the music industry, allowing me to view what was once purely a qualitative field through a quantitative lens.

I am a Data Analyst on the Advanced Data Analytics team at Fidelity Investments in Boston. I work in equity research, but my team does work across all asset classes. We leverage alternative data alongside AI and machine learning techniques to support research analysts and portfolio managers. We develop creative, data science-based solutions to complex questions, and every week looks a little different. I spend most of my time working alongside fundamental research analysts to assess a company or sector. My studies in the QSS department prepared me well to perform quantitative analysis, and explain my solutions to a primarily non-quantitative audience. I regularly use many of the technical, analytical, and communication skills I learned through my QSS classes in my current role.

I am currently working at United Airlines on a Revenue Strategy team. My colleagues and I analyze and predict booking trends for the entire airline. The QSS major at Dartmouth has helped me post-graduation in a multitude of ways. The program gives students a thorough technical background in applied computation. Everyone that graduated with me left Dartmouth with a solid expertise in R and/or Python. Having these skills definitely contributed to my job security while working for an airline during a global pandemic. QSS also enables students to tackle large scale data questions regardless of field. The courses offered combined with the thesis program provide students with an opportunity to not only grow their computational skills but also their analytical, research, and presentation skills, all of which have personally benefited me in the professional world.

After a couple of years in big data consulting, I now work for the Yankees with a focus on player evaluation and acquisition, among other responsibilities. Much of my work involves projecting how players will perform in the future and identifying players who can contribute to a championship roster. My time in QSS 30.01 Sports Analytics with Professor Herron and President Hanlon helped lay the groundwork for my understanding of how data can be a powerful tool in the player evaluation process when combined with what your eyes are seeing on the field. The guest speakers from around the sports world who visited our class were also very insightful and furthered my interest in pursuing a career in baseball.