Practically, I was trained as an engineer. My degrees are all in operations research, not in economics. I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.
Imagine an elite professional services firm with a high-performing, workaholic culture. Everyone is expected to turn on a dime to serve a client, travel at a moment’s notice, and be available pretty much every evening and weekend. It can make for a grueling work life, but at the highest levels of accounting, law, investment banking and consulting firms, it is just the way things are.
Except for one dirty little secret: Some of the people ostensibly turning in those 80- or 90-hour workweeks, particularly men, may just be faking it.
Many of them were, at least, at one elite consulting firm studied by Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. It’s impossible to know if what she learned at that unidentified consulting firm applies across the world of work more broadly. But her research, published in the academic journal Organization Science, offers a way to understand how the professional world differs between men and women, and some of the ways a hard-charging culture that emphasizes long hours above all can make some companies worse off.
Operations Research Analyst
National median wage: $72,596
Best Cities
5. Baltimore, MD ($97,750)
4. Washington, DC ($106,960)
3. Virginia Beach, VA ($93,620)
2. San Diego, CA ($104,880)
1. San Jose, CA ($117,530)
Worst Cities
5. Tampa, FL ($52,830)
4. Jacksonville, FL ($53,210)
3. Miami, FL ($52,870)
2. Tallahassee, FL ($43,440)
1. Baton Rouge, LA ($40,800)
Certified Analytics Professional -- INFORMS
What it's all about: The CAP certification is a rigorous general analytics certification. It certifies end-to-end understanding of the analytics process, from framing business and analytic problems to acquiring data, methodology, model building, deployment and model lifecycle management. It requires completion of the CAP exam (available at more than 700 Kryterion computer-based testing centers in more than 100 countries) and adherence to the CAP Code of Ethics.
How to prepare: INFORMS provides preview material and a Complete CAP Study Guide as an aid. It also provides free half-day CAP refresher sessions for organizations with 10 or more candidates.
First employed by World War II military planners, operations research has become a key tool in the big data age used by companies and other organizations to better allocate resources, develop production schedules, manage supply chains and set prices. It helps transport companies move freight and manage distribution, allows health care systems to improve the collection and processing of patient lab specimens, and lets supermarkets determine how best to organize products, for example.
It used to be that a theme park operator would pair an engineer with a business expert to improve queuing at rides and attractions, notes [INFORMS President] Robin Keller, a professor of operations and decision technologies at the University of California—Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business. Today, that task is handled by a single person trained in operations research.
Ashley Smith
Public Affairs Coordinator
INFORMS
Catonsville, MD
[email protected]
443-757-3578
An audio journey of how data and analytics save lives, save money and solve problems.
On March 28, the White House took a pretty big step toward establishing a broader national policy on artificial intelligence when it issued a memorandum on how the federal government will manage it. It established new federal agency requirements and guidance for AI governance, innovation and risk management. All of this is in keeping with the AI in Government Act of 2020, the Advancing American AI Act, and the President’s executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.”
These days, you can barely spell “health care” without the letters “A” and “I” — and for good reason. In an era of aging populations, declining productivity, rising costs, and disparities in access to care, artificial intelligence presents a rare opportunity to break the vicious cycle by improving health care access, outcomes, and productivity while lowering costs.
New machine learning model helps doctors analyze EEG charts, aiding the detection of seizures in unconscious patients
Will the threats associated with artificial intelligence be as bad as some fear? Or will AI be relatively benign? Could the answer be somewhere in between?
ARDMORE — The Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance will feature noted supply chain logistics expert and author Sunderesh Heragu at its “Supply Chain Academy” on Wednesday, June 12 at the Ardmore Convention Center, 2401 N Rockford Road in Ardmore.
When Joe Biden was a US presidential candidate in 2019, he tweeted, “Trump doesn’t get the basics. He thinks his tariffs are being paid by China. Any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.”
Florida lawmakers have banned wind turbines off its shores and near the coast, saying the bill is meant to protect wildlife and prevent noise.
In December 2019, Connecticut announced the largest purchase of renewable energy in state history. Providing 804 megawatts of offshore wind power, Avangrid’s Park City Wind Project promised the equivalent of 14% of the state’s electricity supply, $890 million in direct economic development, improved grid reliability during the winter and the opportunity to slash over 25 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.