What’s Up Y’all: I’m Megan Barton

3/26/2020 - Quarantine Day 12

(I’m not usually that tan..or have straight hair)

(I’m not usually that tan..or have straight hair)

Hey! I’m Megan, currently a data scientist at 84.51\(^\circ\) working on the Space & Stores team, specifically focused on the current partnership between Kroger and Walgreens. Outside of work and being a part-time Master’s student in UC’s Business Analytics program, I also coach high school girls soccer at my alma mater, Villa Madonna, and volunteer frequently with the Ronald McDonald House. Shameless plug: please go check them out, they do some amazing things for families, right in our own backyard. Outside of being a math nerd, I’m incredibly passionate about soccer (speaking as a washed-up collegiate athlete), food (and more specifically the beer that goes with it), and the state of Kentucky (that myself and my family never left).

Academic Background

Professional Background

I went through a lot of potential career path ideas in high school and college: Journalism, Education, Medicine, and Engineering. Eventually, I settled on a math major, stemming from a passion for Calculus, with the intention of working in the actuarial field. After sitting for my first actuarial exam, I interned at The Cincinnati Insurance Companies in Fairfield, OH, and subsequently decided to change my career path…again. After returning to Thomas More for my senior year, I began my application for graduate school at UC (for the same program I’m now currently in) - to only put that dream on hold to accept a job offer at 84.51\(^\circ\). In the almost three years since I was hired, I’ve dabbled in various sides of the business:

  • Digital
  • Pricing and Promotion
  • “Fresh” Merchandsining (Think Perimeter of Grocery Stores)
  • E-commerce and Walgreens

Specifically, I fall in an “Insights” classification at work in regards to our divisions of data science specialities. Basically, all this means is that I’m most inclined to storytelling, relaying actionable business insights, visualizations, and scoping out business questions in the most easy-to-digest ways possible.

Experience with R

R was actually an entirely new concept to me when I first began working at 84.51\(^\circ\). Everything I’ve learned thus far has been from in-house training at work, self-taught googling, or a graduate school course. I’ve used NLP, text mining, and topic modeling in the past, and I’m a big tidyverse fan.

Experience with Other Analytic Software

R, SQL, and Excel are what I most commonly use in my day-to-day, but I’ve also used SAS, Tableau, C++, Matlab, Mathematica, Excel Solver, Python, and DataRobot.

Anything Else You Want to Know?

Check out my LinkedIn!