To say Jinyuan (Ginna) Chen has a gift for numbers is an understatement—an underestimation, one might say. With a bachelor’s degree in applied math and general statistics from the University of California, Davis under her belt, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in analytics online. She chose Northeastern, she says, because so many professors have industry experience. 

“While my strength is around increasing the accuracy of numbers in data,” she says, “I knew I had more to learn. I met people with backgrounds in different majors and learned a lot from those classmates.” 

For her required capstone project, Chen chose to work with the global athletic shoe and sportswear maker Puma through the university’s Experiential Network of employers. Ginna used both census figures and data shared by Puma to pinpoint optimal locations for new brick-and-mortar stores. She gave a poster presentation of her methodology and findings at RISE 2020, Northeastern’s annual showcase of student research and innovation, and won the prize for Excellence in Computer and Information Sciences. 

“This program was great. I got well trained,” says Chen, noting an unexpected bonus: “I met people from all over the world.”