I will tell you about RS, a Villanova alumnus working as a Data Engineer for the Texas Rangers Baseball team, whom my team and I had the chance to interview today as part of a project for professor SM’s class.
After college, he did tech auditing for EY for two years before transferring to Canon as a Business Intelligence Analyst. Now he is with the Rangers, doing more technical work on data. I thought his passion for sport analytics was what led him the furthest in his career, because he started of collecting statistics about baseball as a hobby and even created his own dashboards and graphs to visualize these data. Then he decided to pivot into this field because it had always been his dream to do so. He also told us that saber-metrics and statistics are more popular and significant in baseball than other major sports. I read about it on a Reddit forum too!
Now his work dynamically changes between season and off-season. When it’s season and his team is competing, he has to work super quick and round the clock right after each match to make sure the raw data is smoothly pushed through pipelines into the right applications so that it come out nice and clean for the analysts to do analytics work. When it’s off-season, he and his team implement major changes to the system to collect more kinds of data and better streamline the process. He said the most stressful time is when the data got stuck somewhere and nothing shows up on the dashboard; he would have to notify the club’s stockholder and work to resolve the issue ASAP.
Of course there is more to this conversation, but I don’t think I’m allowed to say too much out loud. I just think that RS is a inspiring figure in the data analytics and business intelligence field to me. I don’t watch sports, don’t play sports, not a sport fan at all; I’m only sporty; so I never thought sport analytics could be an area that I’m interested in. However, listening to RS’s story helped me understand more about this field and become more optimistic in considering this as my area of interest. Next semester I hope I can register for the sports analytics class. Self note to message him if I ever will.
Trang "Tee" Nguyen 