Portfolio Mentorship Program

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Interest meeting for the 2025-2026 MQM cohort
Author

Mike Aguilar

Published

September 16, 2025

What

A voluntary program to help young analysts build and refine their professional data science portfolios.

Why

Imagine this… you have wonderful grades and a fantastic academic pedigree…But you’re not getting the job interviews you want….Why?

Maybe it’s because employers don’t have access to examples of your great talents.

A properly curated data science portfolio might be a solution.

Who

This program is open only to Fuqua’s MQM students.

Projects

There are two approaches you can take. 1) Work on your own project, 2) Work on one of my projects

Work on your own project

I am happy to advise you and a group of classmates on developing your own research project. I can help with ideation, design, execution, and delivery.

Examples

Dexter Nguyen is an exemplar, being quite prolific. We have many other great examples.

Here are a few githubs and professional sites

Here are a few other specific projects.

AI powered Epidemic & Pandemic Dashboard

  • Authors: Linsong Hao,Haolin Chen, Linkun Ji, Yuhao Lu, Enming Liang
  • Date: 2025
  • LinkedIn article

Quantile Correlations R Shiny App

ML-powered trading strategy

Correlations and Diversification

Correlation Book

Time Committment

  • This is not a course
  • This is not required
  • There is no grade
  • There is no monetary compensation
  • Feel free to dedicate as much, or as little, time as you want
  • Caveat: Be respectful of my time and your teammates’ time
  • The best projects are usually over 1-2 terms. An hour or two each weekend, reduced efforts around exams, extra efforts between terms and at beginning of term when workload is low

Characteristics of a Good Project (for this exercise)

  • Aligned with your interests
  • Aligned with career goals and how you want to market yourself
  • Feasible in time frame
  • Have 3-4 people working together (more productive, more motivation, more fun)
  • Leverage fixed costs
    • Eg develop an app based on weekly data
    • Build the app
    • Write about that
    • Then rerun the app on new data each week and write short interpretation pieces
    • Shiny/Streamlit apps are great for this

How to put on resume

  • Don’t list this Portfolio Mentorship Program nor RA program
  • List your output under “Research”
  • You can note that you worked with me on this project
  • Depending upon your findings, we can craft a proper resume citation

Work on one of my projects

I am a financial economist. One of my current research agendas is well suited for short-term data science projects.

National Income Project

  • Goal: Improve understanding of US business economy
  • To the best of my knowledge I am the first to design, produce, and regularly publish an income statement for the entirety of the US economy.
  • See here for examples

I need help exploring and analyzing National Income and it’s decomposition into industries. Here are a few examples of the types of questions and analyses we could explore

  • Lead/lag analysis between industry revenues
  • Attribution analysis of costs into price and quantity movements
  • Network topography of industry profits
  • Comovement between macro KPIs and income statement

Time Committment

  • This is not a course
  • This is not required
  • There is no grade
  • There is no monetary compensation
  • I expect 1-2hrs per week, with reduced efforts around exams.

How to put on resume

  • Don’t list this Portfolio Mentorship Program, nor an RA program
  • List your output under “Research”
  • You can note that you worked with me on this project
  • Depending upon your specific contributions, we can craft a proper resume citation

Skills / Interests

  • [Required] Comfort with R (e.g. quarto, plotly, etc..)
  • [Required] Comfort with Macro Data (e.g. GDP, recession dating, etc..)
  • [Nice, but not required] Some familiarity with automation via Git Actions

Availability

  • I have 5 open spots for analysts.

Next Steps

Your own project

If you are interested in working on your own project

  1. Pick your own team of 3-5 classmates
  2. Come up with ~5 ideas of your own choosing. These are general ideas, not necessarily precise research questions.
  3. Email me mike dot aguilar at duke dot edu to book at meeting (no deadline, but I can only mentor ~5-10 groups)
  4. During that meeting you pitch each idea. Our goal is to whittle down to 3 ideas.
  5. Your team does more reconnaissance on the 3 ideas and writes one-pagers that include
    • Question
    • Data
    • Method
    • Deliverable
  6. Book a 45mt meeting with me, during which we cull from the list of 3 to the 1 question you will explore.

National Income project

If you want to work on the National Income Project, complete this form by 23Sep2025 5:00PM ET

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