Ipek Randels – Tufts Engineering 2018, Mechanical Engineering
In just a few sentences, please tell us about your current job. I’m a Senior Product Data Analyst at CarGurus, where I have been working for 5.5 years. My main responsibility is analyzing website data to come up with product improvements and improve customer experience. However, on a day to day basis, I complete a wide variety of tasks, including preparing reports, creating visualizations, talking to Software Engineers to ensure correct data collection/tracking, planning tasks and product releases with Product Managers and analysts on other teams, and some more Data Engineering work such as writing code (Python, SQL) to create and manipulate data models.
How did your time at Tufts influence your career journey?
I think above all, my time at Tufts (and specifically Tufts Engineering) influenced my career journey by allowing me to have a multidisciplinary approach to my undergraduate education and to gain a wide variety of skills I could apply in multiple career paths. I am not doing Mechanical Engineering (which was my major) at my job, however, I am using many of the skills from my degree on a day to day basis.
What advice would you offer to a student who wants to pursue a career path like yours?
Keep an open mind and don’t be afraid to try something different! While some people do go into a career that’s directly related to their major, most actually don’t. I hadn’t considered Analytics as a career path before I talked to some Tufts alumni who were working as Business Analysts in the Boston area and decided to interview with a couple of tech companies hiring for similar roles. Ultimately I found that these roles were the perfect mix of numbers and business for me, and decided to pursue a career path in Analytics. Today, I work with a team of very smart people from a wide variety of education and work backgrounds – we all took different paths to get to the same place.
Long story short – you don’t need to limit yourself to the most obvious career path your major suggests. Take the time to talk to people and see what’s out there!
