Academics

Behind the MSDM Student of the Year award: a real client for three semesters, refereed research, teaching, and a student organization handed over intact.

Singelyn Graduate School of Business's MSDM Student of the Year, 2026

The work behind the award.

Nobody hires you because of a school award. The work behind it is a different matter. It was real, it was checked, and it holds up.

M.S. in Digital Marketing · Cal Poly Pomona · 2024 to 2026

A real client, for three semesters

The capstone is a real client, not a case out of a textbook. Mine was Rising Stars Muay Thai, a fight promotion in Sacramento. A team of six, and I ran it.

The Rising Stars Muay Thai website, the client site the capstone measurement was built around
Rising Stars Muay Thai. The tracking, the raw event export and the dashboard all sit behind this site.

I set up the tracking and tag management, moved every raw event into a warehouse so the numbers could be recomputed instead of trusted, wrote the model that found what predicts a checkout click, and built the dashboard the owner reads without help. Everything the other five analyzed ran on top of that. I held the client relationship, and I assembled the final report the team submitted.

The questions were the owner's, not a professor's. Which channel actually sends buyers, how long they take to decide, and where the drop-off happens. The answers, with the numbers, are in the case study.

Every raw event gets exported, so any number on that dashboard can be recomputed from scratch instead of believed. That is the difference between a report you trust and a report you can check, and it is how I build paid work too.

The capstone, in brief

  • Client. Rising Stars Muay Thai, Sacramento.
  • Span. Three semesters, fall 2025 to summer 2026.
  • Team. Six. I ran it.
  • What I owned. The tracking, the pipeline, the model, the dashboard, the client, and the final report.
  • Faculty, in writing. "Unusually strong technical execution." "Genuine value for the client."

The final report is on file with the university library.

What the degree covered

Two years of courses, most of them hands-on. Coursework, not client work: the method is the point, not the result.

Measurement

  • Marketing analytics. GA4 and Tag Manager into BigQuery, SQL, Looker Studio, and R. The Rising Stars pipeline was built here, and so was the first version of this site.
  • Digital marketing. SEO, search ads, email, and analytics. The competitive SEO scraper for a nonprofit, and a rebuild of the center's website.
  • Search engine marketing. Technical SEO, keyword research, site architecture. A site built and published, and a YouTube channel report pulled from the API.
  • Database marketing. Segmentation and reporting from customer data, in Tableau and HubSpot.
  • Attribution modeling. First touch against last touch on the same purchase paths, then Markov chain and Shapley value, and the budget argument between them.

Modeling

  • Customer analytics. Graduate econometrics. Regression, functional form, group comparisons, heteroskedasticity.
  • Market forecasting. Time series in R. A year of vending machine sales, modeled weekly with seasonal ARIMA, turned into eight-week forecasts and restocking recommendations.
  • Advanced analytics. Structural equation modeling in R, PLS-SEM with bootstrapping, clustering, and regularization.
  • Survey research. A questionnaire built to answer one decision, every construct anchored to a published scale, then the analysis of what came back.
  • Text analytics. Python for text. Classification, topic modeling, sentiment, and language models. A corpus of 5,249 responses generated across fifteen models, tested under grouped cross-validation and a permutation test.

Strategy

  • Online consumer psychology. How people decide online. The capstone proposal was written here.
  • Digital retailing. A consulting report on a national beauty retailer, with drive-time maps of its store footprint built in R.
  • Current issues in digital marketing. A weekly seminar on what was changing that year.
  • The capstone. Three semesters with one client. Above.

Research, 2019 to 2020

Before the master's I worked in Cal Poly Pomona's Center for Customer Insights and Digital Marketing as a research assistant, then as a research associate, and from August 2020 led the center's web design and media analytics team.

The research question was why people prefer a product because of the state it came from, and whether feeling strongly about your own state changes that. We ran it as a series: first the effect itself, then when it shows up, then what modifies it. I worked on the design and the analysis and presented the results four times, once at a refereed international conference.

Refereed means strangers in the field read the work and were free to say it was wrong. Asking whether an effect is real and what else could explain it is the same habit I bring to a client's numbers.

Where it was presented

  • Global Marketing Conference, Seoul, November 2020. Refereed conference presentation, co-author. State-of-origin effects and state ethnocentrism. CCIDM presentations ↗
  • CBA RSCA Showcase, April 2020. The modifying role of state ethnocentrism. CCIDM Chronicles, spring 2020 ↗
  • CPP Student RSCA Conference, March 2020. Refereed student presentation: when consumers exhibit state-of-origin effects. CCIDM Chronicles, spring 2020 ↗
  • Southern California Conferences for Undergraduate Research, November 2019. CSU San Marcos: why consumers prefer locally produced products. CCIDM Chronicles, fall 2019 ↗

Talks and panels

Conference presentations, symposium sessions, forums, and student panels. The workshop series is on the teaching page.

  1. 2026
  2. Capstone final presentation showcaseMS in Digital Marketing · August · the Rising Stars results, presented to faculty and the client
  3. Guest lecturer: build a website that sells, in one sessionGraduate classroom, Cal Poly Pomona · July · the symposium session, extended to a full workshop
  4. Admitted Student Reception, student panelSingelyn Graduate School of Business · June
  5. CBA Innovation Symposium: AI Growth LabBreakout session · April · building an SEO-ready website and measuring it · CBA news ↗
  6. 2025
  7. SGSB Open HouseMS in Digital Marketing session · October
  8. MSDM ForumPresenter · October
  9. MSDM Faculty Research ForumStudent presenter alongside faculty · September
  10. Graduate Student Orientation, student panelGraduate Studies Office · August
  11. CBA Innovation Symposium: building a website with QuartoWorkshop session · April · symposium page ↗
  12. 2020
  13. Global Marketing Conference, SeoulRefereed conference presentation, co-author · November · state-of-origin effects and state ethnocentrism · CCIDM presentations ↗
  14. CBA RSCA ShowcaseResearch presentation · April · CCIDM Chronicles, spring 2020 ↗
  15. CPP Student RSCA ConferenceRefereed student presentation · March · CCIDM Chronicles, spring 2020 ↗
  16. 2019
  17. Southern California Conferences for Undergraduate ResearchCSU San Marcos · November · why consumers prefer locally produced products · CCIDM Chronicles, fall 2019 ↗

Teaching

The part of the degree I expect to keep doing.

I designed and delivered a workshop series for the center on R, Quarto, analytics, and building a site that sells, and the recordings ended up as a prerequisite for a graduate course. I finished Cal Poly Pomona's Graduate Teaching Assistant Program, and I have since taught as a guest lecturer in a graduate classroom. The philosophy, the training, and every workshop are on the teaching page.

Founded it, then handed it over

OptiMark, the digital marketing and analytics society at Cal Poly Pomona.

I started OptiMark because marketing students were graduating without having done the work for a real client. I took it through the university's registration process, which completed in February 2026, wrote the bylaws, and set the board up the way a small consulting firm is set up rather than the way a club usually is: a VP for each function, and directors under them running web, data, social, and marketing automation.

Then I filed the funding request, got the allocation, built the website, and spent my last semester making sure the organization would survive me. New officers were seated in June 2026, the transition deck walked them through the re-registration they would have to do without me, and the website repository was transferred off my account in August. It is still running. That is the test I want my client work to pass too.