Eva Dong

Education

• University of Michigan, Financial Engineering, MS
• Zhejiang University, Finance, BS

Career summary

Bringing 10+ years of AI, digital marketing and strategy consulting experience, Eva has held transformative leadership positions at McKinsey & Company and Visa Inc. Her technical expertise empowers her to create significant impact through data science and AI solutions. As an entrepreneur of an AI marketing start-up, Eva has been dedicated to empowering marketers to seize the future of AI-driven marketing. Her experience spans various industries, with deep expertise in tech, media, and e-commerce across B2B and B2C. As a ‘global citizen’, she has worked across North America, the United Kingdom, Europe, Greater China, the Middle East, and Africa. This diverse global experience provides her with a broad market perspective that distinguishes her portfolio and approach.

Q&A

What do you look for when hiring early career professionals?

There are three areas I’m generally looking in for a candidate, regardless of their tenure or where they come from. One will be their skillset, the second will be their domain knowledge and the last one will be their technical knowledge. Because I work specifically in a technical field, I think for new grads specifically or college students or early career professionals, the domain knowledge experience is usually not that much, and it’s totally ok. That kind of experience usually grows with tenure, so then I’m specifically looking at your skills, including your soft skills and hard skills, and your technical knowledge. Those two things, you can have them at school and you can have them as early-stage professionals. When you think about technical skills in school, how much you’re learning, what classes you’re taking, how many programming languages you’re proficient in, those you can easily gain in school. When you think about the soft skills and the hard skills, the soft skills, there are many student clubs where you can grow your leadership, project yourself to test your entrepreneurship, projects you present in your communications classes. I think it’s less differentiating when you look at an application or resume especially for early career professionals or new grads but when you actually meet the person at an interview or at a networking event, the communication skills, the presence, the confidence, and the things you talk about really give people a differentiating advantage. I really encourage our new grads and early career professionals to take the opportunity to network and present themselves in person as much as possible.

Why do you love your job?

I’m at a transitional stage right now. I just graduated from McKinsey, where I spent eight years as a data science expert. I served a lot of clients on the topics of data science, AI, and growth marketing. I recently left Mckinsey and I’m joining Google Cloud Consulting os I think the similarity between my Mckinsey journey to my Google Cloud journey is that I’m continuing the journey to serve clients, to help them solve problems and take challenges that they don’t want to take. I specifically tackle problems in AI implementation: how to use AI effectively, and how to make value from that implementation. There are also differences. I’m going to be primarily serving Google Cloud and Google Cloud customers from now on. Why I love this, I feel like I’ve always had a deep passion for AI. I started my career as a machine learning data scientist, so machine learning is a very mature part of AI. So I think I’ve always just been in the field of AI and I grew myself with the development of AI and that really got me excited.