“I didn’t know it was possible to secure a fellowship at an ivy league school, UDC helped me to achieve that.”
Dayana Delgado
Senior Associate – Research & Strategic Initiatives
Recognizing connections, problem solving, and analyzing data to provide conclusions make up the engine that motivated me since I first began my academic career. When I was growing up, working in analytics was not seen as a practical life path for a woman. However, for a few years I worked towards securing academic training to help me fine-tune the latent skills I know I have.
I graduated from the University of the District of Columbia’s College of Arts and Sciences, with a B. S. in Mathematics. A few months later, I was awarded Columbia University’s “School of Professional Studies Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Fellowship” to pursue a Master of Science degree in Applied Analytics. These degrees fully trained me to be able to empower an organization’s decision-making with data.
I have always valued equality and justice; therefore I decided to use my technical skills and knowledge to help keeping our democracy strong. Currently, I work as Senior Associate in the Research & Strategic Initiatives Department in the Center for Collective Bargaining at the American Federation of Teachers. I analyze data on salary and compensation and benefit packages and identify trends in collective bargaining agreements in order to provide tailored data-driven insights into agreement trends so that we can approach negotiations in a strategic and well-informed manner.
As a minority female STEM practitioner, I want to serve as a working example of a professional leader and team-player who has poured her life into making her dream career a reality and who is now able to give back to her community by giving the middle class a voice, which is essential to both a just economy and a well-functioning democracy.