Haslam College of Business - MSBA Alumni Spotlight: Madeleine Beatty

After earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics, Beatty began searching for a graduate program in business analytics.

“It’s such a newly renovated field, and I knew potential employers wanted to hire well-rounded individuals,” she says. “A friend of mine went through Haslam’s Master of Science in Business Analytics program, which is why it was on my radar.”

Beatty traveled cross-country from Washington State to attend the program, and after graduating in 2015, she went back to the west coast to work as a data scientist at Amazon.

Beatty says she benefited from Haslam’s strong network, which helped connect her with the internship at Amazon that turned into her current full-time role.

“I’m amazed at how strong the program’s network is,” she says. “I know people studying at local universities who can’t get an interview here at Amazon, yet I was able to get one from across the country — to me, it’s just mind-boggling.”

Currently, Beatty serves on Amazon’s Fulfillment Execution Data Science (FEDS) team. “

I have a small team that reports to me, and we’ve been building out a lot of data engineering work,” she says. “It’s fun, and busy.”

Soft skills are essential to have on the data science team, she says.

“All our customers are supply chain people,” she says. “They speak operations language, not technicality, so you have to be able to bridge that communication gap.”

Three years into her career, Beatty says the MSBA gave her the skills to succeed.

“It gave me a broad stroke on everything in the field, introducing huge topics,” she says. “I found that to be especially useful because whatever glove I need to fit, I just do some more research on my own. That kind of approach to education creates more ownership on the student side, which is impactful.”

Beatty also appreciates the program’s balance of technical and soft skills.

“Without that combination of skills, you wouldn’t get far. Now that I’m on the interviewing side of things, we turn down candidates who have great technical skills but don’t have those soft skills.”