Kunal Shukla
"While at Fuqua, I’ve worked with peers who come from as close as North Carolina and as far away as China. Putting a neonatologist, a data scientist, and a BI professional in the same collaborative space helps you appreciate how vast the health care industry is when working on real-world business problems."
MSQM: Health Analytics
Industry:
Prior Education:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Management and Society
Reflections
The MSQM: HA program aligns with my goals and dreams of going to a top school while remaining relevant at my career. Oncology business intelligence is heavily experiential. Immersion on the health care side of the business is needed to learn how the data that you’re working with is actually used downstream. Fuqua offers the leadership and quantitative skills to become an analytics manager, but more so it is a stepping stone to learning the foundational skills needed to learn data science, business intelligence, and programming for beginners in a way that’s accessible, fun, challenging, and rewarding.
Bridging the gap between data science and business in a health care context, the HA program was created to harness knowledge of your prior health care experience and to lead with a data-driven mindset. Now that I’m here and have worked alongside more seasoned classmates, I better appreciate how you can have more impact as a manager than as an individual contributor. Managers hold accountability when it comes to achieving results, growing and developing their team, and leading by example.
Before Fuqua
I curate the data using SQL scripts based on regular expressions created by my senior colleague. Specifically, I compare filtered data with the unfiltered original extract for a set of cancers, identifying inconsistencies. For instance, if I find another type of cancer within the extracted data while searching for subsets of bladder cancer, I work with my colleague to revise the query until it achieves high accuracy. Our goal is to organize this data in a database table for easy extraction and analysis, supporting different internal teams' requests for clinical trial data analysis using my database programming skills and excel analysis capabilities as a separate responsibility.
After Fuqua
My career plans are to get into a senior analyst role, an associate data scientist role, or even a management role if I have the experience by then to be in a leadership position. All of the analytical concepts that I’ve learned – from statistics and data analytics to programming – will be reinforced in terms of application and learning on the job just as they have been in these first two terms.
Career Impact
This program serves as a launch pad and confidence booster. It’s a precursor to everything that can be done with data, but the appropriate use-cases have to be found and that’s where the learning is most effective. I did a presentation to the executive team at Labcorp’s last quarterly business review. They were impressed by how I analyzed a health care data set with R. They saw real value in what I did. Now, it’s just going to take more time to get to a point where I can figure out appropriate problem statements to solve using my knowledge of Python. My next step is establishing a formal mentorship with a senior data science colleague to grow more comfortable with Python.
The MSQM: HA program will show that I’ve learned a blend of analytics and leadership skills, which makes me a versatile candidate for any positions that lean toward one or the other. In my case, it’ll help me land business intelligence management roles in the future now that I've had a few years to establish a solid foundation of STEM knowledge.
MSQM:HA students "meet" in Durham without leaving home
Global Executive MBA
Top Areas of Career Focus
Financial Services (20%)
Consulting (5%)
Sales/Business Development (5%)
Energy/Chemical/Gas (9%)
Marketing/PR/Advertising (6%)
Consumer Goods (3%)
Average Age
Average Work Experience
Countries Represented
Women
Non-US Citizenship
Master of Management Studies: Duke Kunshan University
Undergraduate Majors
Business/Accounting (51%)
Economics (22%)
Liberal Arts (14%)
Engineering/Natural Sciences (10%)
Other (4%)
Average Age
Average Work Experience
Countries Represented
Women
Non-US Citizenship
Master of Management Studies: Foundations of Business
Undergraduate Majors
Liberal Arts (33%)
Business/Accounting (24%)
Engineering/Natural Sciences (18%)
Economics (17%)
Other (8%)
Average Age
Average Work Experience
Countries Represented
Women
Non-US Citizenship
Weekend Executive MBA
Top Areas of Career Focus
IT (16%)
Financial Services (14%)
Health Care/Health Services (10%)
Manufacturing/Operations (9%)
Sales/Business Development (8%)
Consulting (8%)