Ariel Zou, MPS ’25, figured she’d end up in product management. That was her intent after three years of working in marketing and even during her first semester in the Master of Professional Studies program in Information Science. But after she networked, applied to some product management jobs, Ariel changed course.
“I realized product management is such a competitive area,” she said.
Leaning on her background in marketing and data science, Ariel had a hunch her unique skill set would be coveted in the job market. She was right. Today, Ariel is a growth marketing manager at Tilt, a financial technology (fintech) company that helps underserved people access credit. Ariel describes her role as half marketing, half data and AI: she manages user acquisition campaigns and crunches data to analyze the campaigns’ effectiveness.
Ariel received a bachelor’s degree in media, with a minor in business and data science, from New York University, then spent three years working for a tech-driven marketing company in New York City. During her time at NYU and while working in industry, Ariel could see a shift was underway.
“I just came to realize that this tech wave was happening,” she said.
She explored graduate school and considered two tracks: a master’s in business, in an area like business analytics, or information science. The MPS in Information Science at Cornell, she found, offered a broad range of courses, hands-on learning alongside real clients in the MPS project practicum, and the flexibility to custom-design her curriculum and explore different facets of tech.
“I liked how we were able to select courses based on our own interests, so I could take information science courses and computer science courses for more technical learning, and then MBA courses for business strategy and product innovation,” she said. “That’s unique, because a lot of master’s programs have a set curriculum.”
This flexibility allowed Ariel to follow her curiosity, discover, and learn. In that process, she bolstered her data science skills, discovered an alternative career path, and decided to shift gears midway through her MPS experience. In her spring 2025 semester, after a round of fruitless job applications, she broadened her vision beyond product management.
“I was thinking, ‘Okay, what else can I do?’ And then this marketing-plus-data thing came to mind because I have a solid marketing background,” she said. “After a semester of learning data and getting myself back into coding, I had a gut feeling I would be able to crack some of the technical interviews as well. I knew there would be a market for my skill set. And I knew I could do it.”
Networking also proved informative. During her time in the MPS program, Ariel morphed into a networking pro, seeking out Cornell alumni who worked at companies that posted job openings on LinkedIn.
“I think the networking part was very helpful for me in figuring out what the job market was like and in helping me find this marketing-plus-data track,” she said.
Asked to identify skills she learned in the MPS program that she uses each day in her job, Ariel cites coding and efficient use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT to help generate code and create automated workflows.
“The program helped by encouraging us to use new tools, like AI, and play with them on our own,” she said. “I remember what one of my professors had said – these tools are so new and ever-evolving that, once we enter the workforce, much of our learning will take place on the job. I think, by design, a lot of the Info Sci courses exposed us to new computational tools.”
Familiarity with tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude, among others, proved invaluable during job interviews, she said.
