How one Economics student's passion for data led to analyzing music hits and landing a job offer

A few months into her Co-op position as a Data Insights Analyst with independent record label Nettwerk Music, Ana Mayorca encountered a mystery. One of the artists on her roster had a sudden spike in organic listeners in Latin America. Her job was to find out why.

Organic listeners find artists by searching for them directly, rather than discovering them algorithmically via recommendations. Why were people suddenly searching for this artist? Mayorca scoured the data for possible reasons.

In her role, Mayorca was responsible for writing a weekly report on the performance of 15 artists based on metrics she pulled from music streaming platforms such as Spotify, YouTube and Deezer using data analytics tools like APIs, SQL, and Tableau.

“My training in economics gave me a way of thinking about all of the different factors that might affect an outcome, not just the most obvious one,” Mayorca says.   

In the end, Mayorca and her team traced the spike back to a TikTok video. Content creators had translated the lyrics into Spanish, which had helped listeners connect with the music.

Solving complicated questions is one of the reasons Mayorca loves economics.

Her interest in the subject began in high school, when she read “The Price of Inequality” (2012) by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.  “I really like the way he sees the world and tries to understand how inequality persists within societies and systems,” she says. “And I thought economics is the lens that will allow me to do that.”

Originally from Colombia, Mayorca arrived in Vancouver during the COVID-19 pandemic and spent 14 days quarantined in a hotel room before beginning her courses at Fraser International College. Despite this tough beginning, she made the most of her time here, transferring to SFU to pursue an economics major.

She found her professors in SFU’s Department of Economics passionate about what they do. "They are committed to ensuring that students really understand. Because economics has real world consequences – it can inform policy decisions that affect how people live,” she says.

In her second Co-op position as a Customer Insights Analyst with ThoughtExchange, a strategic insights platform for K–12 school districts, Mayorca collects data about school communities and builds reports to help drive school district decisions. “We work with over 200 clients, so their needs are very diverse,” she says. “On the backend, I also help support data ingestion and data privacy – the more techy stuff.” 

Mayorca’s Co-op work term with ThoughtExchange has since led to a full-time job offer with the company following graduation.

Her advice for students? “Just say yes to everything. It ends up creating opportunities.”