Hello! My name is Mitchell Buchan, and I am a senior at Cal Poly. As I finish my last year of college, I am looking for a full time position starting after I graduate in June 2021. With my concentration in Quantitative Analysis and minor in Statistics I have focused on and am passionate about econometrics, data driven projects, and statistical programming. My experience at Cal Poly, including as a TA and the VP of our Economics Society, have strenghted my analysis and team skills and I am excited to transition to a company where I can put those to use.
Through the first three years, I have achieved a major GPA of 3.89 and an Overall GPA of 3.63. I have been also been selected to the Dean's List for six quarters, and the President's List for my sophomore and junior years.
My Senior Thesis, completed Fall 2020 under my advisor Dr. Carlos Flores, is a research paper that attempts to discern both if pharmaceutical profits are significantly higher than other industries, and if so whether that is justifiable based on higher spending on R&D and other factors. I do so by analyzing previous literature and academic discussion around this issue to create a quantitive model to provide an estimate, using a binary pharmaceutical industry variable, fixed effects, and other R&D and financial controls. The linked repository includes the research paper, the dataset, and the R code used for data management and analysis.
View ProjectThe goal of this project is to predict the interest rate of a loan, based off various payment and income information. This dataset includes all loan data for all loans issued by Lending Club from 2007 to 2019, comprising over 2 million observations. With this data, I will explore different standard regression and machine learning models, as well as their sensitivity to the different test-train data splits. Methods include Regression Trees, Random Forests, and Neural Networks.
View ProjectThis is a team project I worked on where we created an R package using the jservice.io API created by sottenad, giving the user access to Jeopardy questions. Our main functions allow you to display random Jeopardy questions, query categories, and query questions, as well as play your own game of Jeopardy! This package can be installed from R with library(devtools); install_github("austinschwarz/trebek"); library(trebek).
View ProjectVisualization of ISS flight pass times over state capitals from the NASA API. The mapping data comes from a US States .json file, which was then used in conjunction with the leaflet package to create an interactive map with the name of the city, as well as the next three times that the ISS will pass over that location.
View ProjectI held twice weekly office hours for students, where I communicated programming and analytic concepts in a concise and understandable way. In this class, I was responsible for covering functions, iteration, recursion, and data structures in python, as well as introducing web scraping and machine learning.
I was responsible for holding office hours throughout the quarter, and proctoring both exams. I offered constructive feedback based around core Microeconomics principles, centering on marginal analysis, equilibriums, equity, and externalities.
Thistle is a health-conscious meal delivery startup, and I worked as a delivery driver for their Bay Area operation.