Andrea Jeniree Rujano
Hello, my name is Andrea. Born and raised in Venezuela, since 2019 I've been living in Brazil with my husband Frank and my daughter Kaori. In 2020 I moved to the beautiful city (located on an island) of Florianopolis, in the south of Brazil.
I've been admiring the beauty of mathematics since I was an undergraduate student. I enjoy the feeling of how everything seems "to fall in the right place," and it is somehow connected. I love the challenge of solving puzzles, that feeling when you suddenly see the patterns or when an idea comes to your mind.
Nevertheless, it hasn't always been my first choice to study mathematics. In fact, in my high school days, I wanted to study informatics or engineering. Someone recommended that I study mathematics while I wait to start an engineering career. During that first semester, I really liked what I learned, so I decided to stay.
It was a good time, with ups and downs but I have always kept that appreciation for the beauty of mathematics. My goal at that time was to become a faculty at the same university where I got my degree, which I achieved in 2013. I spent six years as a faculty, teaching subjects such as Calculus, Geometry, and Linear Algebra. I have also worked on creating math educational content for high school students living in the US, the idea is to prepare them to the top university math and science programs.
After teaching for a while, I started to wonder what kind of career could I do outside academia and, ideally, in a remote setting. A career in technology seems to be an obvious option at the time. Even though I had a hate-love relationship with programming, I started to experiment with some programming languages such as java and javascript. I enjoyed the solving-problem aspect of programming. Yet, I was wondering if I could find an area where I could combine both mathematics and programming to solve real-world problems.
Only when I started a master's degree in Functional Analysis, I was introduced to mathematical optimization. Because I moved to Brazil, I could not continue my master's degree at the University of Los Andes. Then, I decided to apply to a master's program at the Federal University Santa Catarina (UFSC), this time in Applied mathematics.
Through our common adviser Prof. Maicon Alves, Luiz and I got to know Aster Santana. We started to see some applications of optimization to real world problems during our initial meetings with Aster, Eric, and Eder. I finally found an area where I could work outside academia, and use a mix of mathematics and programming.
So that was the start of the journey to become a decision scientist here in Mip Wise. I am excited to see how mathematics, statistics, and computers work together to provide insights and solutions to real world problems with increasing complexity.