Colin Flood

Business Analytics Graduate Student, Villanova University

Below is the video transcript.

I've always been very interested in technology. Out of high school I decided to go computer science, and then I ran into this challenge of one of my professors asking me: do I want to code every single day? I never could answer the question, and they kept asking the same question over and over again. So, I decided to transfer schools and go for IT.

It wasn't until I went to [graduate] school at Villanova for my business analytics degree that I started to get more into data visualization. The business analytics master's program, I think it's extraordinary. They teach you a lot of different technologies. They get your feet wet with Python; you get taught some R. They run you through PowerBI, and they do rapidly change that from year to year for you to pick what works best for you. I became really, really comfortable with R and Python. It was an accelerated course, so I was using these things constantly, and I got lucky enough that I found myself in the perfect storm for JMP. I felt like it was a good opportunity for me to try the software, and I was surprised more than I ever would've imagined.

I was working alongside a couple peers of mine working with a company within the food industry. Originally, I decided to go back to my roots and just throw a bunch of Python, throw a bunch of R at it.

I really found that my approach with Python and R wasn't working because they were all things that the company might have looked at before. We got to a point where we had to completely reset with just about two days left until the end of our final project, and we were in a bad spot. One of my peers actually works with JMP regularly, and as it was taking me an hour or two to code up these plots, whenever I met with him, he was able to just pull up the data so easily and we could mess around with it. I had to ask and see if I could use the software myself. So, I kind of experimented with it a little bit. It was nice. I didn't really have to look at many tutorials. Stuff made sense. How you manipulate the graphs, how you manipulate points, how you get rid of noisy data, it was all just super simple.

I was really, really surprised with how easy it handled a load of data points. With how easy it was able to just pull them all in, set them all up. The rendering was fast. It's just nice and simple. I can just click it right there, and you have your line of fit. However you want to look at data, it had an option and it wasn't hard to find.

It was all so quick that I was like, at one point something's going to hit. I just need to put the time in and just keep going through and trying different things; there's not many softwares out there that'll allow me to change things that quick and just keep moving around ideas.

Not only was our professor, like, extraordinarily impressed, but so was the client. We went on to actually get the best grade in the class, and that was all within 48 hours of work. The solution that we came up with, there's no way that I would've been able to find that using outsource coding. Once we got to use JMP, I don't think it was an even playing field for the rest of the class, because I don't think that they were able to do the things that we were able to do.

If you ever gave me a similar problem, it would be the first thing I went to. If I couldn't get it done with JMP, then I would have to completely reiterate. Something has to be wrong because I'm either looking at dirty data, or there's just something I'm completely missing because everything that you would need to get done with the data set, you can do in JMP. I really think it can make everybody's lives a bit easier and everybody can do something with it, no matter how big or how small the project. There's something about customization, but there's also something about the world that we live in today and just making things easier for everybody, making things more easy to understand. ​