Northwestern IMC: From Taiwan E-commerce Marketing to US Data Analytics

Updated 2026/10/16

This article is a condensed version of the podcast transcript! Click here 👉🏻 to listen to the full episode (in Chinese).

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Hi! Welcome to Jason’s Career Folder. I’m your host, Jason, and I’ve been sharing content about careers and studying abroad for a long time. Here you can open the folder and explore stories, and also edit it with me: build experience, pick up insights and learn new things!

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🎤 This episode’s guest: Oli

Instagram | @oli_chases

Blog | olichases.com

Education | Northwestern University, IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications)

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In this episode:

📂 When you applied, did you plan to work in the US afterward? Which programs did you apply to?

📂 For applicants with full-time jobs: how to ask for recommendation letters and how to help your manager prepare one

📂 Once classes started, was anything different from what you expected?

📂 What are classes like in Northwestern IMC: small or large classes, difficulty, free time?

📂 How many students are in the IMC program? Are many of them from China? Does that affect how you interact with classmates or your experience in class (getting stuck in a Mandarin-speaking bubble)?

📂 Mindset: studying abroad costs a lot of time and money. Were you worried you wouldn’t find a local job and couldn’t earn back your tuition?

📂 Northwestern IMC is a 15-month program with a summer internship in the middle. Did you apply for one? Did you get a return offer?

📂 Studying abroad is often a pivot in location, industry or type of work. Oli stayed in e-commerce but changed the other two at once, moving from marketing to data analytics. How did she convince interviewers and companies she had the hard and soft skills for the role?

📂 Job hunting in the US inevitably means networking, coffee chats and so on. How do you find people to coffee chat with, and how do you prepare your questions?

📂 How did you prepare for interviews? Do you get a lot of behavioral questions?

📂 After a few months working in the US, what differences have you noticed between workplace culture in Taiwan and the US?

📂 A common problem for international students is that companies won’t sponsor visas, and some people even answer “no sponsorship needed” on online applications to get past the screen. How did you deal with this or find companies willing to sponsor, and how do you persuade a company during interviews or after you join?

📂 What does Oli usually share on Instagram?

📂 If you had a time machine, what one sentence would Oli say to herself before going abroad, and to herself five years from now?

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I’m really happy to have Oli here today to talk about studying in Northwestern IMC, job hunting in the US, and how she went from e-commerce in Taiwan to a data analytics role in the US! Oli, please introduce yourself.

Hi everyone listening to Jason’s Career Folder, I’m Oli. Let me start with my background. I applied to marketing programs and ended up at Northwestern’s IMC (Integrated Marketing Communications) program. Before going abroad I worked in marketing, but since finishing Northwestern IMC I’ve been working as a data analyst.

Let’s start with what you did before going abroad. You had three jobs in Taiwan, so why did you decide to study abroad?

I’d always wanted to study abroad. I just wasn’t sure whether to do an MBA or an MS, so I decided to work first after graduating. I studied business administration in college, which covers a bit of everything, and I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted to specialize in. So I started working: first as a PM in tech, then in marketing at an FMCG company and in e-commerce.

I’d actually planned to go abroad after my second job, but COVID hit, so I kept working. Later, because I wanted to work in marketing, I applied to marketing programs.

When you applied, did you plan to stay and work in the US?

I didn’t think I absolutely had to work in the US, but it was one factor in choosing schools: whether a program had STEM designation mattered quite a bit!

I applied to five schools, and all of them except Northwestern were STEM. I don’t think it was a big deal in the end, probably because I applied to pure marketing and marketing analytics programs, which were mostly STEM anyway.

And Northwestern became STEM that same year, right after I applied! So in the end they were all STEM.

A common problem for applicants with full-time jobs is not knowing who to ask for recommendations (it can be awkward to ask your manager). Who did you ask, how did you bring it up, and did you help your manager prepare the letter?

I prepared three recommendation letters. I’d been working for about three years when I applied, so two came from work and one was academic. At the time I was at a Japanese FMCG company and got along well with the general manager, who trusted me a lot, so my first recommender was the GM.

The second was my counterpart at the Japanese headquarters. We worked together a lot: I’d propose things to headquarters and he’d review them. I think having someone from headquarters is a good angle too!

Since I was applying to marketing programs, the third was a marketing professor from college. As for how to ask my manager: I waited until we were both working late and no one else was around, because I didn’t want anyone else to know. Then I told him honestly that I wanted to study abroad. We already had a good relationship, more than just a work one, and we’d chat, so he encouraged me to go and had no problem with it. But he expected me to write the letter, not him. So I wrote it, and he read it over and uploaded it.

Apart from the professor’s, I prepared the other two letters myself. I think professors have more professional ethics; he probably wasn’t comfortable with a student writing it, and I remember he even sealed it, so I don’t really know what he wrote.

But after you’d been out of school for a while, did the professor still remember how you did in class, or even who you were?

Right, he asked me to list a few things about myself from his class to remind him who I was and what I’d done. We’d done some projects back then, so he probably remembered those at least. He also asked me to list a few points I wanted highlighted. I wrote them, but I’m not sure whether he included them.

What studying in the US is really like

After classes started, did you find anything different from what you expected?

Overall it was about what I expected. The interesting part is that IMC covers a lot of different areas, with four sequences: data, branding, PR and media.

After taking branding and data, I found I was really interested in data. Those classes are what first made me want to move into data analytics, so the unexpected part was that I ended up switching tracks.

One downside I didn’t expect is that the school is slow and sluggish about everything. I kept thinking: we pay so much tuition and it’s such a good school, so they should handle things well. They don’t! Both the IMC program staff and Northwestern as a whole are very, very slow. That disappointed me a bit. We pay a lot of tuition, and their service is honestly poor.

Did you run into any bad experiences, like emails that were never answered?

Lots! People around me ran into this kind of thing all the time: emails left unread or unanswered, or answered carelessly. The worst part for us international students is that we often need to consult OISS, the office that works with international students. The school has this office, and you go there to ask about visa matters.

Say you need to apply for something. That’s super critical, but every time I asked a question their answer was really superficial, and they’d even tell me, “You need to research this yourself.” And I’m thinking, isn’t that your job?

Yeah, I think that part is really bad. International students really need this kind of information, and I didn’t get it at all at Northwestern.

How classes work in Northwestern IMC: with different sequences, how much flexibility do you have in choosing electives?

With the four sequences, there’s a lot of flexibility. You don’t have to finish a sequence; it isn’t a requirement, more like a recommendation. If you want to follow the data track, it tells you which classes you can take, and nothing happens if you don’t complete it. So that part is very flexible.

But those are all department classes. Taking classes in other departments is far less flexible. As I remember, we could take only one or two classes outside the department, and they had to come from a list that Northwestern’s graduate school puts out each quarter of classes open to students from other departments. Only those classes were allowed, which I found very inflexible.

Class size, difficulty and who your classmates are: these days many people go abroad and find the whole class is from China, sometimes even the professor, so it feels like studying abroad in reverse

Oh, so true! In some STEM fields even the professors are from China, but it wasn’t like that for us.

Let me start with class size. It depends on the class. We had about 120 people in total, and the shared core courses, which I think were only in the first quarter, were big classes with all 120 of us. After the core, everyone chooses different sequences, so classes get smaller, around 30 people.

In my last quarter I also took a small class with fewer than 10 people, which I really liked. I prefer small classes because there’s more interaction and you can discuss things with the professor. So in IMC, whether a class is big or small depends on the class.

As for difficulty, I’d already had two marketing jobs before going abroad, so I didn’t find it very hard. For me it was more about consolidating what I knew and building on it. Some people in the program had no marketing background, so they learned a lot of new things and had a steep learning curve, which I think is great. The marketing side felt manageable to me, but the data classes were hard. We learned marketing models and even machine learning, and that was painful. Each week’s homework took hours, and every group discussion ran at least three hours. Those were the hard classes for me.

What does the homework look like in these classes? Do you write a report, or do you actually write code to work with data?

Yes, you actually write code. Take machine learning: each week has a topic and uses a certain model, and that week’s homework is a case related to that model. We had to write the code and solve it. With machine learning you have to check the fit, so we kept re-running it again and again.

It was a team project, but everyone had to run it on their own because each person’s results would differ. I’d learned Python before going abroad, but not at this level. What we learned at Northwestern was really hardcore!

Many people say that once they go abroad, most classmates are from China, so it’s hard to leave their comfort zone. They end up speaking Mandarin with classmates and stuck in a Mandarin-speaking bubble. Have you experienced this?

Before applying, I did hear that several of the marketing programs I was applying to were mostly Chinese students. In IMC we had about 120 people in total, and roughly a third to a half were from China, about fifty or sixty people. The rest were Americans and other international students.

Of the five schools I applied to, IMC had the lowest share of Chinese students, which is one reason I really wanted to go there. USC and Maryland, which I also applied to, had a huge number of Chinese students, so I wasn’t as keen on them. In my own experience, because the Chinese share was lower, I didn’t feel limited to speaking Mandarin. I also made foreign friends, not just Taiwanese and Chinese friends, so it didn’t feel very limiting for me.

That said, some Chinese students really did hang out only with other Chinese students, and I think their experience abroad was pretty narrow because of it. Even abroad, they kept to their own group. It probably depends a lot on the department, though. I have friends in STEM departments at Northwestern where everyone really is from China, the professors are too, and apparently even TA sessions can be in Mandarin. I think that’s pretty bad! You’ve come all the way to the US and you’re still using Mandarin. That doesn’t seem OK to me.

Do most Chinese students ultimately plan to go home to work?

Oli: I think it’s pretty polarized. A Chinese friend told me this, and I found it interesting. There are two kinds of Chinese students: “US undergrads,” who did their bachelor’s in the US or came even earlier, and “mainland undergrads,” who finished college in China before coming for grad school. These two groups think very differently. People who came to study early tend to be more open minded and more willing to hang out with people from other countries. Mainland undergrads tend to stick with other Chinese students and are more likely to go back after they graduate. So US undergrads usually want to stay, and many mainland undergrads go straight back.

Jason: A lot of Taiwanese students worry about whether everyone abroad will be from China, but I think that’s really something to ask about before you apply!

Oli: Right. I remember hearing that Maryland was something like 90% Chinese students, and I decided I definitely wasn’t going. So you really need to check this before you apply.

Jason: Yes! There’s quite a lot of information online, and even if a school doesn’t publish its students’ nationalities, you can email the admissions office and ask. After all, you’re spending millions to study abroad…

Mindset while studying abroad

Studying abroad costs a lot of time and money. Were you worried that if you didn’t find a local job, you couldn’t earn it back?

Yes! I was under a lot of pressure, especially before I left. I kept thinking: OK, I’m spending three million, Northwestern IMC tuition is 100,000 US dollars, so will I earn it back, and how? By finding a job, or what? So in my first quarter I studied and networked very hard and kept thinking about it. Later I decided that constantly thinking this way wasn’t necessary!

Worrying about it doesn’t get you a job. It only adds stress. Thinking it all through again, I’d say it’s enough to do project planning for your job search, deciding what to do each month, and to check that you’re making steady progress!

Otherwise you keep yourself in a constant state of tension, and I don’t think that’s needed. You’ll feel the pressure even if you don’t think about it, so why keep dwelling on it? That’s how I see it. I also know people who decided, “OK, I’m here to find a job,” and gave up on social life and the experience of living abroad completely. I think that’s a shame. One friend told me he just stayed in his dorm grinding practice problems and never went out, and he regrets it.

He was a year ahead of me, so I kept that in mind and told myself I couldn’t do that. I had to keep a balance.

Job hunting in the US

Northwestern IMC is a 15-month program with a summer internship in the middle. Did you apply for an internship, and did you get a return offer?

Our program arranges a summer internship for you, so we weren’t allowed to, and didn’t need to, find one outside. They give you a questionnaire about your interests in marketing, since marketing is broad and covers many areas, and about the kind of company you’d like. Then, according to them, they run it through software that matches you with a partner company. I was matched with 3M, which was pretty lucky: a very big company, and a data project, which is what I wanted. So last year I did a two-month summer project with 3M.

As for return offers, this project sometimes leads to one. The year before mine, someone placed at Salesforce actually got a Salesforce offer, which was really lucky. But last year the economy was already bad when summer started. The big layoffs hadn’t happened yet, but things weren’t great, so 3M told us upfront there would be no return offers.

That was a pity, but at least I think the 3M internship was a plus on paper! When I was job hunting later, everyone noticed it and was very interested. So an internship is still a big plus, even without a return offer.

How did you find this job, and how did you convince interviewers you had what it takes to switch into data analytics?

Jason: There’s an idea that studying abroad is a pivot. Most people think of it as a change in location, industry or type of work. Oli pivoted on two of these at once: from marketing to data analytics, and of course from Taiwan to the US.

Oli: Switching careers means you’re someone with no experience, right? And doing it in the US made it really painful. It’s genuinely hard. Compared with finding a marketing job here, finding a data analytics job is much harder. But there are many kinds of data analytics jobs, so I positioned myself for roles that combine business and data analytics.

Data analytics takes soft skills and hard skills. The key soft skill is communication, and my past jobs in marketing and as a PM involved a lot of it. On the hard side, you need strong analytical ability, meaning analytic modeling, plus a feel for the business. So my business side came from my marketing work, and my analytics side came from what I learned at Northwestern.

That’s why I positioned myself as business plus analytics, and I mostly applied for BA and MA roles or marketing-leaning DA roles. I didn’t want to position myself as a DS and compete with people who are deep into machine learning, because I have no advantage there.

Coffee chats

Job hunting in the US inevitably involves a lot of networking and coffee chats. How did you reach out to people and prepare questions so the chats went well?

For coffee chats, the first and most important thing is knowing what your goal is!
Everyone knows coffee chats matter, but I think many people waste time because they never ask themselves why they’re doing it. Decide what you want out of the chat first, then think about who to talk to and what to talk about. For example, if you want to know a company’s interview process, find someone who joined that company recently, or someone at entry level. Talking to that person makes sense. Otherwise you set up a coffee chat with a VP and ask about the interview process. Wouldn’t that be silly?

So set your goal first. It might be understanding the company and its culture, understanding the interview, or understanding what a career trajectory there looks like. I sort my chats by these goals to decide
who I want to talk to.

I also mainly reached out to Northwestern alumni, because alumni are usually friendlier and more willing to talk with fellow alumni.

The real aim of a coffee chat is a referral. How did you maximize your chances of getting one?

Honestly, I got pretty relaxed and open minded about it. I didn’t go into every chat hoping for a referral. Sometimes I really just wanted to know the interview process because I couldn’t find it online.

Looking back, when I did get referrals, it was because I’d prepared really good questions that left an impression.

The second thing, which I think matters more but is hard to prepare for, is whether you have chemistry with the other person. If you click and the conversation flows, they’re usually happy to refer you. But some chats felt stiff and I didn’t really know what we were talking about. In those cases I didn’t ask for a referral. It was awkward, and I didn’t want to bother them further.

Are your coffee chats all online now, where you message someone on LinkedIn and set up a virtual chat?

Yes! Almost all of mine were cold outreach online. I’ve done in-person ones before, when the person was also in Chicago, but especially since COVID people don’t really like meeting in person. If it can be online, it will be, or sometimes it’s just an audio call.

When you want a referral, how do you ask? Do you just ask at the end of the chat whether they can refer you?

No. I’m more indirect. With Salesforce, for example, I asked: “Do you have any suggestions on the best way to apply to Salesforce? Is there a different application process I should know about?”

Usually they get it: OK, you want a referral. Then they say something like, “We have referrals here, there’s a system, I’ll send you an email.” That’s usually how the conversation goes.

Jason: That sounds like a good way to ask for a referral without making it awkward.

Oli: Right! I never asked directly, “Hey, can you refer me?” That would be really weird. I’ve had people on LinkedIn ask me straight out, “Hey, can you refer me?”

I’d advise against doing that, because I find it pretty rude when we’ve never met. I asked some of my non-Taiwanese friends and they all think it’s rude too, so please don’t do it!

When you prepared for interviews, did you get a lot of behavioral questions?

Yes! Every interview has behavioral questions.

I had three jobs in Taiwan, so I’d been through interviews and prepared behavioral answers many times. Behavioral questions don’t feel hard to me. I write out my answers, practice with someone to check whether the story is interesting and makes sense, and then practice the rest on my own.

What I found harder was the technical part, the coding.

Work visas

US work visas are hard to win in the lottery lately (the odds seem to be only 10 to 20%). Does your company offer a Day One green card? When does it start entering you in the H1B lottery?

Day One green cards are actually rare! Only huge companies like Amazon offer them, and not even every tech company does. So no. Once you start job hunting, you’ll see the reality: don’t even think about a green card yet. Many companies won’t sponsor an H1B either. The moment they see you need sponsorship, you’re out.

They just say, OK, we don’t sponsor. I even had one company hear I was on OPT and say, “OK, we’re not taking OPT.”

You get turned down purely because of your status. If you’re job hunting, I’d forget about a Day One green card entirely unless you’re an engineer. My company doesn’t offer a green card either. When I was job hunting I stayed very flexible, because with STEM I had three years, and I wasn’t set on staying a long time. I was open minded: H1B or no H1B, it didn’t matter to me.

Applications ask whether you need sponsorship, and some people online even recommend saying you don’t, because it may be easier to get hired. How did you answer it?

At first I always selected that I’d need sponsorship, just in case. But later I became really open. After being rejected again and again, I thought, OK, it doesn’t matter if I don’t get sponsored. I can still stay three years.

Our professor even told us to be more open minded and not insist on selecting sponsorship. So after that I always selected “no sponsorship.” I’d also heard that because applications are online, many companies automatically screen you out if you select sponsorship.

Some people feel you shouldn’t lie, but I don’t think I was lying, because it truly didn’t matter to me either way, so I selected “no.” And if your interviews go well, they might even consider sponsoring you, so it gives you one more chance!

If you select sponsorship on the online form from the start, you’ve lost every chance.

With STEM you can work at least three years after graduating. Does that count as needing sponsorship? It means we don’t need it for the first three years, right?

Right, you don’t need it for three years. After those three years you’d need H1B sponsorship. The reason I said I didn’t need it is that I might stay only three years. I don’t necessarily need longer.

After you got the offer, did you negotiate with HR or use competing offers to get a higher salary?

I didn’t bring up sponsorship, because I see sponsorship as a policy matter. But salary you should always negotiate!

They usually offer less at first, so tell them, “OK, let me think about it,” and don’t accept right away. Then call back within about a week and explain why you think you deserve more. I think that’s really important!

Some people I know didn’t negotiate and just took whatever salary the company offered. I think that’s a shame, because they ended up with a lower salary. So you should always negotiate!

On whether to negotiate sponsorship, I have a story. A friend said in interviews that they didn’t need sponsorship, then after getting the offer asked, “OK, can I get sponsorship?” The company was upset: you said you didn’t need it, so why ask now? And they withdrew the offer. So I really think this is a policy matter and different from salary. Don’t treat sponsorship as something you can negotiate once you have the offer. If you want to negotiate it, that’s more likely after you’ve worked there a while and they think you’re good enough to consider sponsoring, not at the offer stage.

How does workplace culture differ between Taiwan and the US?

I could talk about this for a long time! The most obvious difference is managers. In my current job and at 3M, where I was only an intern, my manager really respected my ideas and was happy to hear different views. One thing that stuck with me: when we were discussing something, my manager said, “OK, this is just my view, but I don’t want to influence you. I want to hear what you think.”

That way of communicating is very different from what I experienced working in Taiwan! I worked at foreign companies in Taiwan, but even there the culture didn’t respect other people’s ideas this much. Work in Taiwan still feels more like doing whatever your manager tells you.

On respecting people’s ideas, the gap is huge.

How did you train your spoken English before going abroad?

Before going abroad, I only practiced speaking while preparing for the TOEFL, in a study group. After the TOEFL I didn’t do anything specific for speaking. Before leaving I focused more on reading and listening, because I knew we’d read a lot of cases abroad, so I wanted to read more articles!

I read things like the New York Times and watched reality shows to improve my listening. After I got there, my biggest obstacle at first was actually listening, because everyone talks fast. For a while I sometimes couldn’t follow what the professor was saying, but after some time I could understand everything!

So I guess it’s the environment. Once you hear it all the time, you understand.

Any reality shows you’d recommend?

I watch total junk! The point is to immerse yourself in the environment, so anything works.

I watch very everyday stuff. Before going abroad it was things like Too Hot to Handle or The Circle. That’s language you’ll hear in daily life, and even the phrases are ones people actually use, so personally I found it more useful than American TV dramas.

Do you turn off subtitles when you watch reality shows?

In the US I watch without subtitles, and in Taiwan I tried not to look at them.

Oli’s Instagram

You share a lot on Instagram about life as an international student and job hunting. What else do you usually post there?

Earlier I mostly shared things about my applications, like tips and my own thoughts, because I got into Northwestern IMC with a GMAT under 650 and a TOEFL under 105.

Everyone told me, “With those scores you’ll never get in,” and in the end I got in!

So I thought this was an experience worth sharing, to explain how I got in. Many Taiwanese people think schools only care about scores. I started researching applications very early, and I came to believe schools care more about your total package and your storytelling.

They don’t just take you because you have a 320 GRE or a 700 GMAT.

I wrote those posts because I wanted people to understand that. Then, after I went abroad for my master’s, I shared my experience studying, and now working and job hunting. These days I mostly post about my work, life in the US and things I notice, so the focus has shifted.

So people who’ve followed you from early on have basically grown alongside you?

Yes! I think that’s fun.

Some people followed me from when I was applying, through getting in, then applied themselves, and now they’ve come to the US too!

It feels like we’re all working hard together and moving forward, and I find that really touching.

If a time machine could take you to the past or the future, what one sentence would you say to yourself before going abroad, and to yourself five years from now?

To myself before going abroad, I’d say thank you for working so hard back then! Doing marketing in Taiwan was exhausting. I’d work overtime until late, then go home and keep writing essays.

That period was really painful, and I had to get up early too. Going through something that hard is what brought me here, so I’m glad I gritted my teeth and kept going!

It sounds a bit unhealthy, and it wasn’t great, but I’m glad I put in the effort.

To my future self: after living through such a hard time, I hope I never have it that bad again. I hope I keep moving toward the life I want, with more breathing room and real work-life balance. I know what kind of life I don’t want, so I hope I keep moving toward a better one!

If people are interested in Oli’s life in the US or her job-hunting content, where can they find her?

On Instagram my account is Oli_chases, and I also have a blog where I post articles: olichases.com.