Q&A With Economist Nicholas Kogan

Alumnus Nicholas Kogan (M.A. ’17, M.S. ’17) recently joined the homecare management software company HHAeXchange as senior manager of revenue operations. He graduated from Georgia State University with an M.A. in Economics from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies and an M.S. in Business/Managerial Economics from GSU’s J. Mack Robinson College of Business.

Let’s start with why you chose to study economics.

My dad, Steven Kogan, is a professor at the University of Georgia, so I went there as an undergraduate and finished with a degree in communications and a minor in English. Education was important, but I didn’t think economics would be my brand.

However, I got a job as a research assistant at UGA doing data collection and became more interested in doing the analysis behind all the data I was collecting. I wanted the quant (quantitative) hard skills you don’t get from communications programs, and I felt economics would provide me with a combination of those skills and theory I could apply to a business setting.

Why did you choose the economics programs at Georgia State?

I wanted to be closer to the larger job opportunities and internships available in Atlanta vs. small college towns, and to be closer to my then-girlfriend Erin, now my wife, who lived in Chattanooga. In-state tuition made a difference, too.

I started with the M.S. program in Robinson and learned practical things that were useful, and I found that I wanted to explore the more advanced economics courses offered in the Andrew Young School program. You take more broad business courses for the M.S. I wanted to take more econometrics courses and do more economics-focused work.

What practical things did you learn while at Georgia State?

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to serve as a graduate assistant, providing supplemental instruction and helping develop the curriculum, which would come in handy later in my career when I was responsible for the training and development of others in my department. After my graduate assistantship, I was an intern with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, a very appropriate internship for an economics major. It gave me very useful skills I found myself translating to my career.

For example, I was on the phone with the CFOs of large corporations for a survey we did. They have this research at the Fed, the Decision Maker Panel, that’s published on a monthly schedule and indicates how business leaders feel about the current economic climate. I also lucked out that my thesis adviser was a visiting scholar there.

What happened after you graduated?

I worked for a little over a year at a healthcare software company. When I applied, they asked me to present something I knew about — a key project — and I presented my thesis. It went over their heads, but it showed I could talk about complicated data-oriented problems in an insightful way.

Then I went to Honeywell, a Fortune 100 company in Midtown Atlanta, first as a lead analyst, then as the manager of sales compensation planning, and then as a manager of sales analytics. I had three jobs in three years. Large companies move you around, so you see the business from a lot of angles.

Next, I went to a software startup that supports Amazon sellers — giving them insights into how their business is performing — for about a year. Then I moved to the Swedish electric autonomous long-haul trucking company Einride as a manager of revenue operations and the Salesforce product owner.

I started at HHAeXchange in early November.

What made your Georgia State graduate experience unique or special?

Lots of people at GSU are holding jobs while they’re studying. We had skin in the game and were not spending our two years socializing at very expensive private universities.

I think that coming from an institution like GSU, there’s some grit involved and a willingness to take on any challenge. You get all the right education and access to great material, and you also have an appropriate sense of humility. You learn plenty from all sorts of different problems, and you know to approach them with the attitude that everything is worth engagement and that you’re not working on anything that is beneath you.

How does your economics background help you in the work you do?

Economics really sharpens your critical thinking. It helps you see different patterns in a business and how they apply to a lot of moving parts. Economics helps you understand a model of how the world works, and how different components changing at any given moment can have multiple downstream impacts. Sometimes solving one problem creates two more.

NOTE: All classes required to earn Georgia State’s M.A. in Economics can also be completed online. Students complete a capstone paper and 33 hours of graduate coursework that can be completed in two years or less. Learn more about the program here.