STEM
STEM Blog
Keep Asking “Why?”
By Bobby Cole ’06
March 20, 2022
Tags STEM
What were your interests and studies at Hamilton College, and how did those experiences prepare you for your current career?
At Hamilton I majored in math, minored in English, and rounded that out with a variety of other coursework (computer science, economics, even a photography class to get that liberal arts experience). Far-and-away, the most important aspect of all my Hamilton experiences was that I was able to further develop my critical thinking skills. If we're being honest, most of the actual coursework a student completes as an undergrad is not going to come in handy in their career (I have never found a solution at work by cracking open my abstract algebra textbook and formulating a proof). But having the ability to focus your innate curiosity to pursue answers to challenging problems is useful in a variety of fields, and that is a skill students practice every day.
What do you find the most challenging about your job? What do you find the most rewarding?
For me, the most challenging aspect of my role is managing a team. For the first six years of my career, I worked in research and data science rules as an individual contributor. This is a pretty natural transition from being a student, since 99% of your ability to be successful is fully within your control. When you move into managing, you have to put a lot of trust in your team to do their work up to your standards, recognizing that they will all approach solutions differently. I think I have gotten better at this over time (I started managing in 2013), but it's still a much different sort of challenge than the quantitative problems I'm more comfortable with.
What motivated you to seek this career path?
Not a great answer here. I worked for about 18 months at Pratt & Whitney in the research center after graduating. My girlfriend at the time (now wife) really wanted to leave Connecticut and move to New Hampshire where her family is from, so I looked for companies in the area hiring analytic roles and found Liberty Mutual. I guess that just shows how fungible the STEM toolkit is, since making a career change from a defense contractor to an insurance company was really easy.
What advice would you give to current Hamilton students thinking of pursuing this field?
The standard advice I give is to lean in to your curiosity. Don't accept the first answer you get, but keep digging deeper and asking “why?” A common problem insurance companies face coming out of the pandemic is that the amount of claims we are paying is increasing at a very high rate. If you accept a surface-level answer to that question (like, “people are crashing more”) you won't come up with good solutions to the problem. But if you keep digging you'll uncover a multitude of factors (people are driving more and driving patterns have shifted away from rush hour; used car inventory is low due to global chip shortages; the profile of a commuter has shifted as many office jobs are now fully remote; etc.). Individuals who approach problems with the mindset of wanting to leave no stone unturned are generally going to be successful in analytic roles.
