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Problem-solving skills pave the way to a technology career

Greg Gengo was good at math. He liked computers. But it was his penchant for solving problems that led to his job in institutional research.

TOP 3 LESSONS

Take control of your own path. When Greg first entered the Navy, he voluntarily went in as "undesignated," which meant he didn't have input into his role. If given the chance to do it all over again, he would have made a different choice, because it wasn't until later that Greg got to choose a job that suited his interests.
Be open to opportunities. In college, a professor approached Greg with an opportunity to enter a STEM program. Greg had to drop one of his majors (political science), but the move qualified him for a grant and put him on a path focused more on technology.
Share what you know. Greg shares his expertise in institutional research at conferences all over the world, including Japan.

THE JOURNEY

Hospital corpsman
United States Navy

Technical operations, international sales support
A major airline

BS in computer science and mathematics
Texas Woman's University

Data Warehouse Architect, Office of Institutional Research and Data Management
Texas Woman's University

MS in mathematics
Texas Woman's University

AT A GLANCE

What is institutional research?

Institutional research, which is Greg's focus at Texas Woman's University, involves collecting, analyzing and warehousing data on the university's students, faculty, courses and curriculum to improve campus decision making and planning.

15k
Texas Woman's University, where Greg works as a data architect, has about 15,000 students.

9
Greg has done nine presentations at conferences as close to home as Texas and as distant as Tokyo. His most recent presentation was Architecting Big Data for Bayesian Gateway Course Analysis.

Qualities of an institutional researcher

While there aren't many academic degrees that qualify you to do institutional research, the job typically requires skills in statistics, research methods, data visualization and reporting.

I feel like we've used SAS to revolutionize our department.

GREG'S STORY

Q: When did you first realize you had a knack for math or computer science? Did you take advanced courses in high school?

A: Those skills didn't really manifest when I was younger. I did take the highest math and science courses that were available, and I did well in them, but I think that's mostly because I enjoyed problem solving.

Q: What is it about solving problems that's so interesting to you?

A: I like quantitative problems – I like reading about them and figuring them out. When it comes to more qualitative things, like writing, it's harder for me until I can find a way to make them quantitative. So my senior year of high school, in English, I was on the verge of having to do summer school. It wasn't that English was hard, but writing was so subjective and I always had a hard time finding my voice. I never had those issues with math or science.

Q: You went into the military shortly after high school. Why did you make that choice? Is there anything you gained from it that helped your future career?

A: I went into the Navy because I didn't think I was ready for college yet. I had the same issue a lot of kids have where I thought school was boring, and I didn't know what else I wanted to do. When I enlisted, I had to take a test and scored high enough that I could have gone into anything in the Navy, so I was told to go in undesignated so I could do different things and find something I liked. In reality, though, I didn't get to pick – they told me what to do. I got deployed to Bahrain and was there for several months. After that, I was finally allowed to pick something, so I chose something in the medical field and became a hospital corpsman. I do think that I grew up a lot in that time when I was undesignated because I was immature when I started. I learned to be more responsible.

TECHNOLOGIES HE USES

Base SAS^®Software

Flexible, extensible 4GL and web-based interface for data access, transformation and reporting.

An industry-leading data management solution that helps you improve, integrate and govern your data.

Interactive reporting. Visual discovery. Self-service analytics. Scalability and governance. All from a single, powerful in-memory environment.

On Presenting in Japan

I presented at a conference in Tokyo on how I use SAS to do institutional research. It's a topic that's been around for about 50 or 60 years, but the focus on analytics is fairly recent – and in Japan it's barely a decade old. They're trying to figure out how to modernize, and we're doing some interesting things at our program, so Japan is trying to learn from us.

Presenting at the conference was intimidating, because I don't speak fluent Japanese. I'm actually trying to learn it right now. The school wants me to come back out at some point, and my goal is to show them that I respect our working relationship enough that I can try to speak Japanese.

On Learning SAS^®

When I started my job at the university, my professor, who is now my boss, already knew SAS. At the time, everyone was doing a lot of Excel, and then we realized we could just program in SAS. [My professor] asked if I could do it, so I had about five weeks to learn SAS on my own. I later took a course on it when I started my master's degree, but I'd already taught myself everything so the course was easy.

I already had some programming experience, but SAS was a different language. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but once I figured out it was object-oriented just like anything else, I got it pretty quickly.

On Using SAS^® at Work

I do feel like we've used SAS to revolutionize our department. There are definitely other schools that are doing great things with SAS, but I'm proud of how our department is using SAS to push university analytics. We do custom solutions. I think that helping onboard SAS has improved our shop's efficiencies.

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