When everything feels urgent, I prioritize by evaluating tasks based on impact, deadlines, and dependencies. I start each week by breaking down larger goals into smaller, actionable items using a task management tool or spreadsheet. For example, during my internship, I often balanced tasks like updating sales dashboards, preparing reports for leadership, and analyzing promotional timing. I learned to identify which tasks were blocking others (like waiting on inventory data before building a deck) and used that to plan my workflow. I also checked in regularly with my manager to confirm priorities and make sure I was aligned with team goals. Clear communication, time blocking, and staying organized helped me execute effectively under pressure.

In my research-focused economics courses at Virginia Tech, maintaining accurate and clean data was a critical part of every project. For one assignment, I was analyzing how commuting patterns affect community well-being. I had to integrate multiple datasets—from the American Time Use Survey, Census commuting data, and occupational wage data—which were formatted differently and came with varying levels of quality. To ensure consistency, I standardized column formats, filtered out duplicate entries, and created a documentation log to track variable definitions and assumptions. I used Excel for cleaning and STATA for analysis, regularly cross-checking values against the original sources. This attention to accuracy was key to producing meaningful, trustworthy results, and it allowed me to present insights that were both statistically sound and easy to interpret for non-technical audiences.

During my internship at Krispy Kreme, I built and managed an Excel-based performance tracking system to monitor sales and operational data across 30+ store locations. The goal was to identify trends and support weekly reporting for the operations team. I created linked spreadsheets that automatically updated KPIs like sales growth, product mix, and promotional lift. I used formulas like VLOOKUP, IF, and INDEX-MATCH, and designed pivot tables to make the data easily filterable by store, region, and timeframe. The final spreadsheet system became a key resource during weekly performance meetings and helped inform promotional timing and inventory decisions.