Morgan Lan

Business Analyst Intern

My professional journey kicked off the summer before my senior year, at CITIC Securities in Guangzhou — my first real look at how financial institutions operate from the inside.

The work centered on supporting a PE firm's go-to-market push: analyzing sales performance data, building investor roadshow materials, and helping position complex financial products for client delivery. I was also working directly with clients as an analyst-slash-advisor, which pushed me to distill dense quantitative research into something people could actually act on.

It was here I first ran into the gap between being analytically right and being understood — and realized that closing that gap is often more valuable than the analysis itself.

Data Analyst Intern, Cold Chain Capacity Planning

That experience convinced me I wanted to go deeper on the technical and operational side. The summer after graduation, I joined SF Express's cold chain capacity planning team in Shenzhen.

Cold chain is unforgiving — a temperature excursion doesn't just mean a complaint, it means spoiled product and broken SLAs. I worked directly with e-commerce merchant teams to understand what the operational data was really saying, then built a Python optimization model for staffing and fleet deployment under demand uncertainty. Alongside that, I set up SQL and ERP dashboards to monitor the cold chain daily across outbound, sorting, and last-mile delivery.

The model held up in production — not just in the spreadsheet. Keeping temperature excursions under 1.5% became a trackable, daily reality rather than an aspiration.

Technical Support Specialist (part-time)

Back in Seattle for my master's at UW, I took on a part-time support role alongside my studies — a different kind of operational work, but operational nonetheless.

The job was about reliability: managing classroom IT access, keeping Zoom and LMS sessions running smoothly for 100+ students, and troubleshooting issues in real time before they could derail a lecture. Less about building systems, more about making sure the ones that exist don't fail when people are counting on them.