Career Encounters: Cindy Hall

I chose to study business my freshman year of college and I just after about two years of taking business classes and doing fairly well, I decided I wanted to study more behavioral aspects of people, that I rather going to political science because I was more curious and wanted to learn more about behaviors of people instead of just about microeconomics and things like that.

I think I’ve always been a very curious person. I’ve always study behaviors but studying political science made me more curious, made me observe people even more and now I’m doing statistics but I’m still studying behaviors and we still look at why people do what they do, why they buy what they buy. So the link between political science and people’s behavior was obvious because that just shows you why people do what they do and how they come to that decision. What I do now in the analytics department is we basically take data and we perform different analytical studies to answer client questions and address their business issues.

A client will come to us and now their business issue is they want to know how their advertising is doing. Basically, we will perform a statistical technique that can isolate the effects of this variable advertising and quantify the volume gained from that.

What interests me the most is that I see results of my work and it’s on a short-term basis. I know that what I’m doing actually gets used and I can see that. Market research is huge growth area right now. There’s right now several companies that have just started up in Chicago. People that come out of this job — they always come out with so much experience because you’re given the responsibility at such a young age even if you’re right out of college.


The video clip above was taken from Career Encounters: Political Science which APSA released in 2000. The documentary-style video features people from across the US who studied political science and discuss how their political science backgrounds have been critical to their vocations, their avocations, and their general lives. Career Encounters feature careers that can be launched with undergraduate degrees as well as graduate degrees.