From WKU to Vancouver: Alumna Wang Chunyan Builds Her Path in Business Analytics

Wang Chunyan studied Accounting at Wenzhou-Kean University from 2016 to 2020, later earning a master’s degree in Business Analytics from UBC Sauder School of Business. Since 2022, she has worked in Vancouver as an Application Analyst at Vancity, where she supports payment systems and works across business and user needs.

Looking back on WKU, Wang remembers a campus that gave her room to explore. Moving from a more traditional learning environment into an international, English-medium university initially challenged her, especially in spoken English. Over time, conversations with faculty from different cultural backgrounds helped her become more confident and open to different ways of thinking.

Academics remained an important part of her undergraduate life. Wang completed the ACCA qualification and graduated with a 3.94 GPA, while also making time for student activities. She served as manager of the soccer club and later founded a food club after noticing that no similar student organization existed on campus.

She also studied at Kean University in the United States for a semester and traveled widely during college. WKU’s international learning environment gave Wang opportunities to balance academic work with exploration, helping her become more comfortable with uncertainty and new experiences.

After graduating from WKU, Wang explored different business settings through internships at a big data company in Hangzhou and Bilibili. These experiences helped her see business beyond accounting and introduced her to different operating models, management approaches, and ways companies create value.

She began to notice a pattern in what interested her most: finding a “gap”—a problem, unmet need, or missing connection—and then analyzing how it might be solved. That interest eventually led her to pursue Business Analytics at UBC, where she studied programming, machine learning, statistics, and business applications.

Wang also stayed connected to the WKU community after graduation. Together with two classmates, she co-founded a social media account that shared graduate school advice, academic experiences, and everyday life at WKU. Over two years, the group published nearly 100 posts to help younger students navigate university life and future planning.

Today, Wang works at Vancity as an Application Analyst, coordinating between departments and users and helping maintain payment software. The role continues to draw on the same skills she developed across accounting, business analytics, and student activities: understanding needs, identifying problems, and finding practical solutions.

Wang describes her growth through the image of a tree: the trunk keeps growing upward, while the branches are free to extend in different directions. For her, having a clear direction does not mean following only one path. It means staying grounded while remaining open to new possibilities.