I was hired by Northwest Airlines after graduate school as an analyst in their pilot-staffing department. In that job, I was responsible for forecasting the number of pilots the company would need three years into the future. After a couple of years, I became a senior analyst who took those long term predictions and worked them into the pilot staffing plan for one to four months into the future. On a continual basis, I needed to predict pilot vacations and leaves and determine if the pilots could be trained in time for the company to use the ideal marketing schedule.

Although the positions in the pilot-staffing department hadn't previously been filled by someone with a background in statistics and mathematics, the person who hired me recognized that my analytical skills would work well for the job. The staffing of over 6000 pilots requires analysis of large amounts of data, which is exactly what many of my math courses taught me how to do. Logic, operations research, and regression classes were especially helpful in knowing how to formulate a question for my problem and then find a meaningful answer with the data.

An interesting project I was once in charge of was related to a legal arbitration concerning pilot staffing ten years in the past. It was a very important project to be heading and I was the one chosen because of my ability to work with numbers.