Bo Sripharphan ’15, a Statistics and Sport Management double major, has been hired to work as a business planner for Nike at the Katy, Texas branch following graduation this May.
He will be part of the sales team responsible for nationally managing the Academy Sports + Outdoors account, and his job will be to analyze sales data for trends in order to make product recommendations to the Account Executive.
“Over the past few years, analytics across all lines of business has really caught on,” said Sripharphan. “Now, we are able to integrate big data and trend analysis into the decisions we make. It's a matter of balancing the art of retail with the science of data. Retail can be incredibly unpredictable, and it is an aspect of the job I really cherish.”
Sripharphan was able to get his foot in the door with Nike last summer, when he interned in a similar position in their Katy, Texas office and had the opportunity to spend a week at the Nike Headquarters in Portland, Oregon.
“My primary tasks during the internship were to comb through months worth of product sales data,” Sripharphan said. “I was very familiar with this type of work from my Statistics courses at Rice, which revolved around this idea of taking data sets and presenting key findings in an impactful way.”
Sripharphan is the third Rice University student in the last four years to be hired by Nike. Jesse Tsu and Christine Jeon also started at the Katy, Texas office and have since been promoted to the International Headquarters and Amsterdam office respectively.
Dominique Bessette, a senior from Antioch, Illinois, is majoring in Sport Management and minoring in Business.