Julianna Brooks, ’17, is a market analyst for oil and gas services company Austin Industrial in Houston, Texas.
“My degree path and everything within UL Lafayette was so important in getting this job and being able to execute on this job,” she said.
The Perfect Job for a Young Economist
While the support she got from UL Lafayette was important, Julianna’s enthusiasm for economics was an integral part in finding her perfect job.
She handles market analysis and financial analysis, which are "two very fun, very important, very exciting functions within my organization," she said.
“First and foremost, as the market analyst, I work with our sales and business development team to analyze market trends and to analyze our internal data,” she said. “I’ll take our internal data and I will apply it to external trends.
“I put together pretty extensive reports on ‘this is where we’re positioned in the market’ and ‘these are certain markets that we are well-positioned to take advantage of,’” she said.
“On the other side, I do financial analysis as well, but that is so interconnected with the market side,” she said. “I’ll take our internal finance trends and I’ll do gap analyses and I’ll look at what our internal trends look like and I do help report that data to the board, as well."
Julianna works closely with Austin Industrial’s senior vice president of finance to manage the company’s forecast and rolling backlog – both of which are tied to the trends she analyzes.
“It’s so great to tie into the external market force as well,” she said. “They’re less powerful independently and together they make really powerful insights.”
“It’s the perfect job for a young economist, truly,” she said.
Julianna’s career in economics started with an internship while she was still a student at UL Lafayette. She utilized her connections on campus to get an internship doing data analysis with Bryson Law firm.
“It made all of the difference,” she said. “On one hand, you’re getting real, professional experience but then you’re also able to bolster up your resume as well as get credit for it. I mean, it was just an all-around wonderful experience."
Economics Over Burritos
Julianna also met some of her favorite people in the economics program at UL Lafayette. They bonded over burritos after classes.
“On Thursdays, we would go to Izzo’s and we would get burritos,” she said. “We went after econometrics class and we talked about economic theories and we were just bouncing ideas off of each other and it was such a blast.”
Econometrics (ECON 418G) is the capstone class for the economics program and one of Julianna’s favorite classes.
“I found that class to be so exciting because what they’re teaching in that class is ways of answering questions for yourself,” she said. “The main basis of the class is learning how to perform regression analysis.
“Regression analysis is the way that most economics papers use to establish trends and it allows us to answer questions about the real world for ourselves,” she said. “It allows us to take these totally disparate sets of data and it allows us to go find good sources of data.
“The big end of the class was writing this 20-page paper and you hear about writing this paper from freshman year and you’re always thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, at the end of this I have to write a 20-page paper,’” she said.
“Then you get to it and you’re like, ‘How do I get this to fit in 20 pages?’ because there’s so much freedom of creativity,” she said. “That’s a huge, exciting part of economics: that it’s like hard science with a really good sampling of art and creativity. It gives you so much power to answer questions for yourself.”
Another really important class for Julianna’s career was Money and Banking (ECON 320).
“It’s definitely the one that gave me the most practical knowledge for what I’m doing today," she said.
This class was so useful that Julianna still has her textbook from the class.
“I have it in my office because there are so many things within the program that I still use on a regular basis,” she said.
An Early Interest in Economics
Julianna’s love for economics started over a decade ago during the 2009 economic crisis.
“It was so interesting to me,” she said. “There was something that just really drew me to it because I was like, ‘I wanna know why this happened.’ Obviously, I didn’t understand it at the time and it’s still such a convoluted issue.
“The entire financial system is based around people making decisions and it’s not a hard science, it’s all so theoretical,” she said.
“When you’re a kid, you always think, ‘These people are so much smarter than me,’ and there are all of these processes in place so people can’t make mistakes in these situations,” she said, “but really what economics dictates is that these systems are built around human flaws.
“Human behavior dictates the way we decide to live our lives and spend our money and run our businesses – and I find that really interesting,” she said.
Julianna found the perfect place to develop her skills in the economics program at UL Lafayette.
“It is such a bright spot that it is really often times overlooked,” she said. “The school, the professors, and the people and fellow economists – I could not imagine a better program and one that’s more grounded in the human aspect of economics.”
