NC State’s Institute for Advanced Analytics welcomes students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including some who enter the MSA program with significant previous professional experience. This video features two such individuals, with Carlos Castillo ’24 — who holds a Ph.D. in economics from UCLA and worked in macroeconomics at the Bank of Guatemala for three decades — interviewing Ana Maria Echeverri ’12 in October 2023. Ana Maria came to the MSA program with an MBA from the University of Southern Mississippi and nearly 20 years of software industry experience. She’s now the Global Head of Business Development, Generative AI, Customer Experience Use Cases for Amazon Web Services, and was named the AIconics AI Innovator of the Year for 2022.