Michael Oguntuase ’25

Michael Oguntuase had established a career in marketing, working mainly in the field of TV and brand sponsorships. Though he’d helped brands connect with audiences through media partnerships and large-scale campaigns, he wanted to take that experience further.

“I realized that a lot of the decisions that we made were driven by data and analytics,” he says. To be better at his job and advance in his career, he knew he needed to elevate those skills. He was accepted into a number of graduate programs, but it was a conversation with a representative from LeBow’s Graduate Student Services that led to him to commit to Drexel.

“When I talked to someone at LeBow, they really identified what I was looking for and what would serve me best, and it all really came together,” he says.

He enrolled in the MS in Business Information Technology (BIT) program, which offers stackable certificates adding up to a master’s degree. That choice has paid off in his current role as a senior marketing data scientist, a heavily data-driven job, in the insurance industry.

“My role focuses on acquisition marketing analytics, and my day-to-day typically involves data and modeling, to understand how our marketing efforts influence how we get our customers,” he says.

Having a solid grasp of the data is a big source of satisfaction for him. “I like being able to forecast our ideas — to understand the right time, the right place and the right effort for whatever campaign we’re trying to run,” he says. “I can look at what we’ve done before and what we plan to do and make recommendations: ‘This is a good idea, but it’s bad timing,’ or ‘These parts of the campaign can be held for later’.”

The job demands a mix of skills. On the one hand, he says, “it’s being able to interact with data, to clean it up or to use tools to present it visually.”

Then there’s the interpersonal piece, the ability to tell the story differently to the people in accounting versus, say, those in branding: “I need to simplify the insights for every shareholder, so that they can buy into what I’m telling them.”

LeBow helped him to develop that critical mix of skills. “One class that stood out to me was MGMT 603, Technology Strategy” with Professor and Department Head of Management Dali Ma, PhD, he says. “It opened my eyes to the strategic thinking behind a lot of the major tech companies.“

Particularly impactful was the professor’s decision to bring a variety of leaders from different fields, and have them give presentations on the paths their careers have taken since the start.

“Imagine sitting in the class and being able to listen to a former astronaut — someone who’s actually been to space — and now he’s working in aerospace,” Oguntuase says. Those encounters opened his eyes to new ways of approaching his own career trajectory, “and that’s something you can’t buy anywhere.”

He took away from LeBow a passion for continuous learning, something that he pursues in his job today. “There’s always something new to learn,” he says.