okay my name is Sherry Luckett and I'm a senior analyst here at koh's um the Credit Service and operations group I am in the decision analytics team and on the Acquisitions portion of that group there's three branches you have Acquisitions account management and then data management um generally that's how a credit organization will work and the cool thing about economics is that you're working with data the entire time um you are generally in the no before anybody else is um as it relates to economics the first thing you would want to know as a freshman day one is what economics is economics is really the study of scarcity um and how people and firms and societies deal with scarce or limited resources um and how they make their decisions you have two studies or two branches of Economics macroeconomics and microeconomics um macro is really the focus of the overall economy and microeconomics is how households and again firms and societies make those decisions that affect them directly um my role here at Coal's credit we tend to do a lot of different things to touch the customer um but when we use economics it's more to project out how we are going going to do on the receivable side the accounts receivable and how much the customer is going to put on that Coal's charge um we forecast out losses which is really the percent of folks on our portfolio that are going to default um we also P we also predict how many folks are going to go bad within the first 60 to 90 days of being on the account um this all is to make sure the portfolio is healthy and that we're not going to basically have a ton of bad accounts on our books the three key attributes required to be a successful Economist I am going to say that you need to be very inquisitive um you can't you can never take anything for face value when you're in economics you have to want to dig deeper and below the surface another thing is you need to enjoy research um when you again when you're in economics you're dealing with the data so you want to formulate a hypothesis of whatever that problem is what's this possible solution before you even dig into the data and then you want to be able to grab all the information you can to either support or refute what you think is going to solve that problem um you also need to be a really great communicator because you are going to have many complex um topics and and solutions but you need to be able to communicate it on every level to every individual within the company whether it's the operations group or all the way up to upper management vp's executive VPS all all of the levels and then you need to just be excited about knowing what's going on so those are the three key attributes that require that I would say would require you to be a successful Economist common career paths um generally forecasting and risk management are common career paths you'll generally see a title of analyst that could be a business analyst quantitative analyst intelligence analyst but generally the distinguishing factor between an economic analyst versus all other analysts is that you have certain tools that you need and different techniques that you're going to use to solve that problem um because you are again dealing with tons of data you can't just use Excel you need SAS SPSS R something of that nature um but economics in general spans all fields and industries I mean you can do economics and health care um marketing Finance Sports so that's one thing to get excited about is that with with the field of Economics it is the basis of all things um overall the role of Economics is to be able to quantify and back up your assumptions with actual or real data so that's the overarching premise of being an economist in general um what do I enjoy most I enjoy the field in general because because again I'm solving problems I'm addressing a problem directly it's not just today this the poll shows that this President is going to win blah blah blah based on what this person said it's the actual data that comes from what is in the marketplace and then I put that to the solution I kind of call it having 10 puzzles dumped in the middle of a table and you still have to find the solution within all of those puzzles that you're put together it's tons of moving Parts but again you're putting everything together to get to this one solution and it's very sound it's not an assumption it's not an opinion it's what the data showed you economics again is the understanding of scarcity supply and demand um the macro and micro economy it's all the basis of any business however there's still quite a few companies that just do not understand economics and its benefits and so you're constant salesman of what the value is of Economics econometrics quantifying an assumption to be able to say this is what it really is that's solving the problem and not what you think it may be or a gut reaction a lot of companies are still doing a well my gut says this is what the issue is but with the account metrics and in economics you are saying but the data shows this in your studying Behavior um what advice would I offer those considering economics uh overall economics is a fascinating field I mean it's not just for coals it's not just for any company it's for the entire world it's all based on economics it's it's one system that is the secret to all business um every other field is based on it so I guess with that said you become the expert as the person that has the economics background you are the almost the most powerful person in the room because you have the data and you know the secret to the to the the problem before anybody else does and that's the cool part of Economics you no one can ever really tell you that you don't know because you've actually done the digging into the problem and into the data