The blend of technical aptitude and interpersonal skills he acquired during his time at Syracuse University’s iSchool has helped Sumit Gupta, G’17, move up the ranks in the business intelligence field.
Gupta earned his bachelor’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Mumbai before relocating to the United States in 2015 to attend the University. He graduated with a Master’s degree in Management Information Systems and a Certificate in Data Science.
“One of the reasons I opted for information systems is because I did a bachelor’s in engineering and wanted to grow on ‘business and data’ aspects too,” Gupta said. While his engineering background provided a solid technical foundation, he was eager to broaden his horizons and deepen his understanding of the business and data-driven facets of technology.
The Information Systems graduate degree was perfect because it wasn’t too programming heavy or code heavy—plus, it drove him to be better at speaking to groups and interacting with individuals.
Since graduating from the iSchool, Gupta has worked as a marketing analyst at Cengage in Boston, then moved on to be a Marketing Analytics Manager at Dropbox and a Senior Business Intelligence Analyst at Snowflake.
In 2022, he wrote the book, The Tableau Workshop: A practical guide to the art of data visualization with Tableau. Packt Publishing published the book, which is required reading at about a dozen universities.
Gupta, who currently resides in San Francisco, works now as a business intelligence engineer at Notion, an AI-powered suite of workspace tools that aims to boost productivity and creativity. The tools cover content generation, summarization, and translation.
He’s been in the role at Notion for about one year, where he supports the marketing team with data requests and dashboards. In a nutshell, Gupta makes sure that the company’s decisions are based on sound data. The role provides the information needed so executives know if they’re optimizing the money they spend on advertising campaigns and other corporate expenses
“Managers and VPs are so much into the weeds that they generally don’t get the data view,” Gupta explained.
Gupta also leverages data to help salespeople improve their performance.
In addition to the technical aspects of the job, he interacts with stakeholders in the company on cross-functional teams, so he gets to collaborate with others—something Gupta enjoys.
One critical aspect of his role is being able to transform “messy” data using a business intelligence platform.
“These tools and these concepts were taught at Syracuse,” he said.
Looking back on his time as a student, Gupta can pinpoint exactly how his graduate education at the iSchool supported his upward career trajectory—and his successes at Notion.
“When I was at Syracuse, one of the most important parts of my experience was that we were required to do an internship after the first year,” recalled Gupta, who said he had to learn about companies and opportunities, and reach out to promote his services. “This allowed me to get out of my comfort zone,” he added.
His courses at Syracuse in data warehousing and data visualization were foundational to launch his career.
“These two courses played a pivotal role in me getting my first job,” Gupta said.
For his end-of-the-semester project, Gupta had to create a dashboard and present it in front of an audience. The presentation helped boost his confidence as a speaker.
“That’s what I’m doing now [at Notion],” Gupta said.
Another thing he’s doing is continuing to learn, and Gupta focuses on technical and soft skills when he chooses what to dive into next. This year, he’s working on being a better communicator.
He’s also looking to move into a career as a data engineer at some point, so Gupta has his eyes on taking more technical courses to “upskill” himself.
In the meantime, he encourages students at the iSchool to consider joining the team at Notion.
“We are always looking for talented people and Syracuse has some very talented people,” he added.