About Me

Nicholas Bridgman

About me

Hi, I am a graduate student working on my Master of Science in Business Analytics at CSUCI (expected December 2026).

My current objective is to gain a strong foundation in the tech skills I need to establish a career in the fast-moving AI and business analytics field.

My career goal is to apply my expertise at crafting and implementing AI tools to assist businesses in optimizing their performance, and to assist clients and individuals in optimizing their personal needs and development goals.

My personal website is nicholasbridgman.com, and my professional self-discovery app is tryrhetorical.com, developed with assistance from the EDC and the MSBA program.

Academic Background

I am currently pursuing an MSBA at CSUCI. I also earned an MBA from CSUCI, and two BAs in Ecology and Rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley.

Professional Background

Background related to my business analytics career includes:

• Currently working as a Graduate Assistant in AI Research for the AI and Business Analytics Lab at CSUCI.
• Serving for a year on CSUCI’s inaugural AI Ethics Board.
• Designing and deploying an AI-powered professional self-discovery and communication coach app I created, called Rhetorical. I am currently working with the EDC and Professor Chen to build a business model and publish an academic paper on this app, with the goal of introducing it to companies in similar areas which would find both it and my academic background valuable to hire and/or acquire.

Outside my business background, I also have:

• Over 10 years of experience in music production, and currently working in groove-oriented jazz-house, based on my long background in contemporary jazz and classical training.
• Over 10 years of experience in writing, both fiction and academic - including various published short stories and articles on academic topics, including AI implementation on college campuses (links to my publications are available at my website).

Experience with Excel

I have over 10 years of experience with Excel, including a course offering a strong graduate-level overview during my first semester in the MSBA. This helped me gain skills for analyzing data, such as using PivotTables and creating visualizations.

Experience with R, Python, PowerBI, & Tableau

I took an introductory Python course during my first semester in the MSBA, which introduced me to the main functions and coding practices in Python. It helped me understand what is possible to do with Python, and from there I know how to use AI to obtain the specific coding and best practices to implement it.

I have seldom or never used the other three tools, but am confident I could learn quickly in both this course and by asking AI.

Experience with other analytic software

I have experience with the following:

• Google Colab – using its coding agent to analyze spreadsheets and other datasets. For example, I am able to ask it to run regressions and create visualizations, and then interpret and refine the outputs for my own use case.
• VS Code - editing, running, and pushing to GitHub various document types. For example, within VS Code, I used the coding agents Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Codex to create Rhetorical, taking advantage of MCPs to communicate with Claude, GitHub, Render, Supabase, Figma, and Stripe.
• SQL - querying databases to analyze datasets, including using Supabase as a backend platform for my app development.
• HeuriSight - extracting heuristics from interviews with a business advisor to model their reasoning and thinking styles. I trained an AI model to replicate this as part of my Google/SBDC internship with the MSBA last Fall.