Jim Kloet

What do you do as a data scientist and director of your Insights & Analytics team?

 My team develops reports and analytic tools for clients and internal stakeholders, builds predictive models using machine learning algorithms, and meets with clients to answer questions and to help them uncover insights in their data.

Why did you choose to major in Psychology and how has that affected your career thus far?

I struggled with mental health while I was an undergraduate, and I thought that courses in psychology could give me some insight. Psychology helped me to better understand myself and the challenges I was working through, but more broadly, it gave me a set of tools to rigorously evaluate.

What was your career path like?

I didn’t put my best foot forward while I was at U of M (to put it very generously!), so after graduation, I waited tables and tended bar while trying to figure out what I should do with my life. I ended up enrolling at another university for a year in order to get some research experience and to improve my transcripts, which helped me get a research position at Northwestern University, working in a lab studying language in the brain. I used that experience to gain admission to a PhD program in cognitive neuroscience, which I left after reaching candidacy, in order to begin my career as a data scientist.

What advice do you have for students getting a degree in the UM Psychology Department who are considering your profession?

First, get as much research experience as you can! Even if you have no interest in academia or a career as a researcher, the process of designing experiments, analyzing data, and communicating findings to different audiences will help you to develop a set of tools for gathering evidence and answering questions about anything that interests you. Second, try to find some projects or hobbies that you can use to help develop your analysis and modeling skills outside of your coursework or day job. There are countless high quality sets of data available for free - find one that interests you, ask some questions, and try to find the answers in data!

How do you use your psychology undergraduate experience in your work?

I took my first statistics courses as an undergraduate in psychology, which helped me develop tools for data analysis. My organization develops personality models for routing calls at contact centers, so my coursework in personality psychology has been a big help!

If possible, would you change anything about your career path?

Absolutely yes. I would have made a stronger effort to get involved with research at an earlier point in my career. In addition, I would have made a bigger effort to develop my skills as a computer programmer - writing and testing code has had a dramatic impact on how I think and work.

What has contributed most to your career success?

I think anyone who doesn’t answer this question with “luck” is probably not being honest with themselves. But outside of that, I think perseverance - I failed a lot in my life, and I’m sure I’m going to fail a lot in the future. But that’s ok! Learning from those failures and continuing to pursue my goals.