How a Love of Exploration Influenced This MIS Alumnus' Life Trajectory
Growing up in Zhengzhou, China, Zhikai (Kai) Guo ’14 BSBA (MIS) ’16 MIS kept busy. He played soccer outside with his friends, and when he got too tired, he went home and played games on his family’s computer. Guo also loved to feel like an adventurer, traveling around Zhengzhou via bus.
“Whether trekking through new streets or immersed in technologies, childhood for me was about pushing exploration,” he says.
And it didn’t stop there. Guo cultivated this desire for a sense of adventure as he grew up.
When he started applying to college, “it honestly felt like I was opening a blind box,” Guo says. He sent his application to five business schools, but he didn’t know where he’d land.
Upon receiving an acceptance letter to the University of Arizona, he was excited but curious to learn about the desert. An avid NBA fan, he only knew about the Suns team in Phoenix. But as he researched, he was charmed by the cacti, sunshine and warm winters of Tucson.
“Coming from a dense city in China, I’ll admit Arizona seemed like Mars at first,” he says. “But … I couldn’t resist the call of adventure—plus a strong business school.”
And the Eller College of Management was the right choice for him. Although Guo didn’t know what to expect when he took MIS 111, he was hooked after Bill Neumann’s first lecture. Intrigued by the broad applications of MIS, Guo stayed after class to ask Neumann questions about his own experiences and career.
“By the end of our chat, I had decided then and there to pursue MIS degrees, fascinated by how this field blended technology, business strategy and practical problem-solving skills,” he says.
While at Eller, Guo appreciated learning from faculty members who incorporated textbook theories, hands-on projects, case studies and guest speakers. He was also grateful for Eller’s career coordinators, who helped connect him to potential employers like NXP Semiconductors, where he later secured an internship.
“The Eller community equipped me to hit the ground running in my field— an advantage I know my peers from other programs did not always have,” he says.
After completing his bachelor's degree, Guo went on to work at Nextrio—an IT services company based in Tucson. As a network consultant, he configured firewalls, provided ongoing system maintenance and troubleshot network outages.
Guo then went back to academia to pursue his master’s in MIS, also from Eller. Next, he made the move to become a project analyst at NXP, where he built analytics solutions to support the company’s R&D portfolio.
“Between the thrive-or-drown moments at Nextrio and high-impact analysis work at NXP, these early career roles gave me invaluable real-world experience,” he says.
The childhood desire to explore continued into Guo’s adulthood. In 2020, he pivoted to Amazon, where he started as a business intelligence engineer and was promoted last year to manage a BI team serving retail and tech programs within Amazon. The key aspect of his job is “building data solutions to help teams make informed, timely decisions around retail operations and planning,” he notes.
At Amazon, he loves the people he works with and finds the fast-paced environment fulfilling.
But he’ll also never stop evolving and exploring. “Of course, the complexity and scale at Amazon means I’m constantly learning and being challenged too,” Guo concludes.