I have knocked on doors in Beirut, pitched sponsorship, run a CRM pipeline and built an e-commerce business from nothing. Then I went back to study the analytics properly.
That order changed how I work. When I open a dataset I already know which decision it is meant to change, because I have been the person who had to make that decision in the field with incomplete information.
Right now I am finishing an MS in Business Analytics at AUB and building a system that decides where a salesperson should spend their week. Most of what I enjoy sits in the gap between a clean model and a call someone actually has to make.