Interviewing My Mentor

Today, I had a chance to interview my mentor, Craig, who works at deFacto Global Inc. in downtown Troy. Craig grew up in Schenectady, New York and went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He majored in business and management for undergraduate with minoring in economics. He got his master's degree in business and analytics, where he learned data analysis process from understanding what to do with raw data, transforming the data, and being able to make insights out of it. Throughout his life, he always tried to understand the way how world works, and he thought combing business knowledge and economic theory would give him better understanding of the world, which made his decision about the major. At first though, he wanted to study accounting. However, it became too repetitive for him, so he decided to shift his main focus into a more general one, business and economics, instead of just focusing on accounting. The reason for working at DeFacto Global is the connection between his school and the company. DeFacto Global was actually a sponsor of one of projects he was working on as a project leader at college. He worked with deFacto for three months, basically "getting interviewed for three months." Through the project, he was able to get real world experience and also got along with Bob Bedard, CEO of deFacto Global. After the project was done successfully, Bob offered Craig a job at his company and started working there. Their goal is to implement a machine-learning, forecasting-type model to their system and to introduce Artificial Intelligent (AI). His job is mainly to explore all the possibilities and test each one of them to see if they work. For the past three months at the company, he has been researching different models that could possibly work and seeing if they benefit the system and software. Some challenges would be a lot of uncertainty that exist in both of these fields, modeling and AI; there are so much material, so many different ways, wide open area, so it is challenging to pick what they want and which works the best for them. The biggest challenge he and his colleagues are currently facing is how to take the idea of what they want to do and make it into the reality. Right now, he is focusing on learning as he graduated from school recently and has only little experience in the field, but he is eager to use whatever skills he has to impact the world in a positive way eventually although he is not fully sure in what way and how. Therefore, he continues to absorb as much information as possible. My last question to him was some advice to current high school students like me, and the question actually took him almost two hours to answer. He said, "find something you are passionate about and work towards it, but you can always change, so don't feel pressure." and "When you get to college, get to know your professors because they are important resources and helpers." I appreciate his corporation in this interview.