“When I first got to U-M, I didn’t know anything about the BSI program,” says Charlotte Parent. “I thought Python was a snake.” 

The avid reader and writer from Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan, arrived at the University of Michigan planning to major in her most fruitful, familiar subject: English. Then came an offbeat suggestion from her dad that she take Introduction to Programming with Python, a course offered by the School of Information. She almost brushed him off — learning to code sounded intimidating — but in the end she agreed to give it a try. 

What came next, as the semester with professor Colleen van Lent got underway, surprised her: She realized she was having fun. 

“It was a complete 180 from everything I thought I liked and knew. I was trying to figure out, why do I enjoy this so much?” she recalls. “Well, Python is a coding language, so it is learning a language.” Once she made this connection, everything clicked. Just like learning French in high school, she understood this new skill would require practice; there was no expectation that someone would be perfect going in.

Not only did she finish the course, but she immediately applied to be an instructional assistant — a role she has held every semester since, guiding other students toward aha moments like her own. Parent applied, also, to UMSI’s Bachelor of Science in Information program, where she is now a senior on the information analysis pathway.

“I chose to do the IA path because it was so unfamiliar,” she says. “Here’s this big set of data. It's not organized. It's not clean. There are errors everywhere, missing values — all that fun stuff. Because of the BSI program, I can be handed this big, ambiguous problem, and I know how to approach it and fix it.” 

Parent didn’t abandon her love of reading and writing; she is double majoring in English and doing the creative writing capstone. Last summer, as a data analytics intern at the J.M. Smucker Co., she realized both majors have been preparing her with the same crucial skill: communication. 

“Having a real-world experience really just showed me how well the program prepares you to feel confident both in your technical skills and these soft skills that are super important,” she says. “There was so much communication involved in my internship: ‘That's cool that you can code, but can you talk about the problem to stakeholders? Can you tell the manufacturing plant workers what you found in this data?’”

At Smucker’s, she was tasked with evaluating the profitability of promotions. She spent the first half of the summer working on pet food products like Milk-Bone. For the second half of the summer, she got to analyze advertisement placement for an iconic product: Smucker’s crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

“I was mind blown,” she says. “‘I’m working on Uncrustables!’”

While presenting her findings to team members and stakeholders, Parent discovered that this kind of work is her jam. 

“I love storytelling with data,” she says. “That’s appealing to me more and more when I’m looking for future roles. I think it’s great to be able to clean the data, great to analyze it. But it’s so important that your insights are accessible, that you’re talking to people in a way they can understand.”

When she started the BSI program, she saw two separate paths. Sure, the word “interdisciplinary” had been emphasized, but in Parent’s mind, it went something like this: If you choose the user experience design path, you learn Figma and become a UX designer. If you choose the IA path, you learn Python and become a data analyst. 

“I thought, you can only code. That’s all you can do,” she says. “And I’m glad to say I was wrong.” 

Parent knows she wants to pursue a career working with data, but she realizes now that she’s graduating with a powerful skill set she can apply in different roles and industries, not a predetermined career path. She’ll spend the next summer at Ford Motor Co. as a strategy analyst intern, creating new customer experiences by integrating hardware, software and people.

Within the UMSI community, Parent has been a guiding presence as president of the School of Information Bachelor’s Association, a torch she passed in January. 

“Whether it’s a movie night or being able to talk to faculty in curriculum meetings, it was so awesome to play a tiny role in representing students’ perspectives,” she says. “It’s just good people in the BSI community. That is not lost on me.”

And she isn’t leaving UMSI just yet. Next year, Parent will earn her Master of Science in Information degree through UMSI’s Accelerated Master’s Degree Program. She chose big data analytics as her specialization. 

“I’m so interested in doing it because it kind of scares me,” she says. “It’s a rigorous, data-driven program, and though I feel confident in my coding capabilities, I know I still have room to grow.”

The MSI was the only graduate program she applied to, and she’s willing to admit that decision came down to more than data: “The fact that it’s in the School of Information, that it’s still the UMSI community, swayed me — in a very good way.”