Adam Spannbauer

"I am a big fan of open source software and communities..."

Business Analytics & Statistics - Faculty

After graduating from Haslam’s MSBA program in 2015, Adam Spannbauer immediately joined the business analytics team at Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee. “I worked mainly on natural language processing type projects,” he says. “We were looking for ways to automatically collect insights from internal documents, ultimately to save time for the company.”

In his spare time, Spannbauer pursued side projects in software development. “I am a big fan of open source software and communities, and I do my best to stay active on GitHub,” he says. “In particular, I’ve worked with R and Python to the point that I have contributed to or published packages in both programming languages.”

Spannbauer’s open source projects attracted the attention of Sensor Tower, a technology startup in the San Francisco Bay area. The company, which has created an app analytics platform, reached out to Spannbauer and started a conversation that would lead to a new job and a cross-country move in August 2018. “I wanted to try out the startup life,” he says. “I’ve always lived and worked in East Tennessee, so I wanted something new.” Today, Spannbauer serves on Sensor Tower’s mobile insights team. “I’m using some of the skills I learned through the MSBA program and prior experience to find insights in the mobile app ecosystem.”

 

Looking back on his first three years in the field, Spannbauer says his education at Haslam provided the foundation and experience he needed to succeed. “I think the biggest asset of the program was the capstone project,” he says. “It gave us a sense of how it is to work on a real project, where you often have to learn and adapt as you go.” He also values the partnerships the department has forged with top employers. “My first professional experience was largely owing to those relationships,” he says. “Eastman Chemical Company is no stranger to hiring graduates of the MSBA program.”

As his career unfolds, Spannbauer hopes to continue learning and progressing in the field. “If I’m still having fun doing side projects, then I think I’ll be doing all right professionally,” he says.