April has always been a unique month for me. Many unforgettable events happened in April in the past, such as my participation in the International Exhibition of Inventions of Geneva and my birthday. This April has been wonderful as always.

At the beginning of April, I signed my first full-time offer from Veeva Systems. Veeva is the company I have been working for throughout my practicum project. It is a leader in cloud-based software for the global life science industry. I feel lucky to work in the Tech X Life Sciences industry because I have always been interested in these two fields. I always believe health and education are two investments that we should never quit. I am glad I chose the Master of Management Analytics (MMA) and I look forward to continuing to create value at Veeva. 

My birthday is in early-mid April. I did a road trip to Elora with my best friends to celebrate. It is a lovely peaceful town with lots of charm. It has a beautiful gorge, rugged cliffs, and several beautiful trails along the river. I really enjoyed the dinner and chat with my friends in a restaurant by the cliff overviewing the river. 

All the courses are fun in the spring term, but I want to talk about one course specifically--Optimizing Supply Chain Management and Logistics. I have learned a lot in this course since the beginning of the term. Its content mainly revolves around four supply chain drivers: capacity, inventory, transportation and pricing. In April, my group and I completed a very interesting assignment on transportation, to optimize the food delivery services in the Greater Toronto Area. My group and I leveraged the optimization techniques learned in class and our understanding of the operations of the online food delivery platforms in order to design an algorithm that minimizes the total distance travelled by the fleet while meeting customers’ wait time constraints. It was a tough assignment, but after we went through it all and looked back, we found it a very great learning experience.

Several days after the assignment was due, I experienced a hectic day at home and I had no time to cook. It was 9 p.m. and I was super hungry, so I decided to order some food on an online food delivery platform. The assigned driver brought the food over very quickly. He was smiling when he handed me the food, very humble and polite. I was very grateful to him that we had such a smooth hand-off experience, so we thanked each other. That moment really triggered me because it reminded me of the course group assignment. In that moment I realized the power of beautiful and humanistic algorithms.

I feel fortunate to have learned such valuable knowledge in the MMA program. From that little experience, I can feel the enormous potential power of data analytics and algorithms. It will always remind me to take advantage of this knowledge to create value, to connect people or businesses and allow them to help each other using their comparative advantage and make the world a better place.

The Master of Management Analytics is designed to give students the advanced data management, analytics, and communication skills needed to become an analytics professional.