By Megan Bowen | Photos by Levi Sim

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Ryan Nkunda’s transformative moment as an Aggie happened during his junior year. He was standing in front of a group of business executives who needed meaning and clarity from their data, and he was able to provide it.

It was the first time he saw himself not only as a student who could analyze data, but as someone who could make it matter.

Today’s students are demanding transformative skills they can use, experiences that count, and opportunities that connect their learning to the real world. That promise is taking shape through the Analytics Solutions Center (ASC), part of the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business.

“I believe the ASC has prepped me 100% to be ready for the professional world, giving me confidence to walk into rooms, share my ideas, and know that I belong there,” Nkunda says.

That confidence didn’t come easily.

He grew up in Rwanda and attended high school in Utah. When he arrived at Utah State, he knew he wanted to study business but didn’t yet know who he wanted to become. After exploring several paths, Nkunda discovered data engineering. The challenge of gathering messy, real-world data and shaping it into something people could use felt deeply satisfying.

Still, Nkunda kept his head down.

“I always thought the kids doing projects were the smart ones,” he says. “I’d just get my A and go home.”

That changed one afternoon when a professor stopped him in the hallway.

“He said, ‘Hey Ryan, do you want a project?’ I said, ‘Sure, why not?’” Nkunda recalls.

That offhand invitation pulled him into the Analytics Solutions Center. What started as “just a project” quickly became something more — meetings, client calls, deadlines, and expectations far removed from textbook datasets and neatly defined homework problems.

At first, Nkunda was terrified. He had a stutter and hated speaking in public. The idea of leading a client meeting seemed unthinkable.

But in the ASC, hiding wasn’t an option.

“Pretty quickly they were like, ‘OK, you’re going to lead this meeting,’” he remembers. “I said, ‘Someone else can do that.’ They said, ‘No. You’re going to do it.’”

Nkunda learned how to ask better questions, redirect conversations, and translate technical work into language an executive could act on. He also discovered that people in positions of power were, in the end, just people.

The projects grew in scope. Through the ASC, he joined teams that traveled for hackathons and summits with partners such as Microsoft and international nonprofits. He found himself in rooms filled with leaders — rooms he’d once assumed were off-limits.

“Being there and talking to people, I realized, I could work here,’” Nkunda explains. “It stopped feeling impossible. It was like, if I just start moving, I can get there.”

That’s what made his junior-year presentation moment so powerful. He wasn’t just showing charts, he was guiding decision-makers through what the numbers meant for their organizations. The student who once tried to stay invisible had become the person at the front of the room.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

If Nkunda’s story is about discovering his voice, Brooke Monson’s is about finding her place — and realizing how far data can reach.

Monson grew up in Logan and hadn’t planned on staying for college. That changed during her junior year of high school, when Huntsman professor, Dr. Chris Corcoran, visited her AP Statistics class and talked about data as “the new sexiest career.”

“He made it sound really enticing in his Chris way,” she remembers.

When Monson arrived on campus, she still didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do, only that she loved statistics and wanted something that would be useful in any industry. The newly launched data analytics program checked all the boxes.

She threw herself into hackathons, trips, and any opportunity she could find. Those experiences eventually led her into the Analytics Solutions Center, where projects stopped being hypothetical and started touching real communities.

Two of those projects became turning points.

The first was with the Utah Women and Leadership Project, where Monson and her team analyzed data behind Utah’s long-standing gender-equality challenges.

“Diving deeper into all the different qualities that contribute to that made me realize how much bigger of an issue it is,” she says. “It wasn’t just about a wage gap. It was systemic, starting with the messages girls absorb in elementary school and building into something much larger.”

The second project focused on Cache County School District, again using data to understand how policy decisions played out across different groups in the community.

Those projects shifted the way Monson saw both data and her future.

“It made me realize how big of an impact data could have. That it’s not just these little SQL projects we do in class,” she explains. “I started seeing data as a way to understand these huge cultural and political problems at a deeper level.”

Now applying to graduate programs with plans to study policy and, one day, become a professor herself, Monson credits the ASC with giving her both direction and courage.

“The ASC gave me a community of lifelong friends and a group of faculty and mentors that have shaped my entire educational experience,” she says. “It gave me unmatched networking opportunities, and I attribute so much of my academic experience to the Analytics Solutions Center.”

For both Nkunda and Monson, the ASC isn’t a replacement for their coursework, it’s the context that makes it come alive. They still sit in classrooms, study theory, and take exams. But alongside that, they’re accountable to real partners, using messy, imperfect datasets to help organizations make decisions that affect people’s lives.

In many ways, that’s exactly the kind of change higher education is being asked to make.

Students can learn Python or statistics from a video. What they can’t get from a screen is the experience of opening an email from a real client whose broken dashboard they’re responsible for fixing.

They can’t replicate the experience of walking into a room full of nonprofit leaders, or CEOs, or policymakers and realizing they have something meaningful to contribute. The stakes are real, but so is the support.

Doug Derrick, Executive Director of the ASC, sees this as a powerful evolution of what a degree can offer.

“We’re bridging two sides of the same coin,” he explains. “Giving students the chance to solve real-world problems while delivering real value to our partners. In many ways, this is the future of higher education — an apprenticeship model where students gain meaningful experience solving real problems.”