There’s a lot of data out there. And that data is often easier to collect than it is to sift through, organize and analyze. That’s where Tanya Cashorali and TCB Analytics come in. The 2008 Northeastern grad just left her job to launch her own consulting company to help various companies and institutions understand the data they collect.

“I’ve been noticing a trend that there are all these low-hanging fruit problems that people have when it comes to solving big data problems,” Cashorali, who majored in computer science and biology, says. “Never mind the complex big data and data science problems, most companies don’t even know which questions to ask or how to structure their data to analyze it in the first place.”

Since her first co-op in 2004 at Partners HealthCare, Tanya’s professional career has been driven by a strong interest in data and its applications. She landed that co-op because of a suggestion from her co-op advisor, who was tuned in to Tanya’s eagerness to exercise skills from both her majors. “It got me really interested in personalized medicine and the data side of things,” Tanya says. It’s not surprising then that her second co-op was as a bioinformatics analyst at Boston Children’s Hospital. Her last co-op was at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where she worked as a bioinformatics analyst and web developer – and where she met a life-long friend who she’s worked with at three different jobs after graduation, including the one she recently left at Biogen. Former boss-turned-friend, Josh Walker, has also been instrumental in the development and launch of TCB Analytics.

“Graduating with a year and a half of real-world experience gives you such an edge – I see people with four or five-year degrees with no experience and they have a very hard time finding a job because employers want that experience,” Tanya says.

Those 18 months of work experience meant Tanya graduated with a job waiting for her at GNS Healthcare, a Cambridge startup using data to improve personalized care for patients. After three-and-a-half years there, first as a senior scientist, then as a manager, Tanya moved on to positions at Dataspora, Basho Technologies and Comlinkdata – all positions rich with opportunities for data analysis. At Comlinkdata, which she joined as director of analytics before becoming vice president of product development, Tanya helped the company move from a consulting model into a profitable data products company. She joined Biogen as a data scientist in March this year, a job she left in November to focus on TCB Analytics.

“We’re going after the interesting projects,” Tanya says. And with so many companies and institutions looking for people to make sense of their data, Tanya can choose the projects and clients she wants to work with. “The main idea is that we want to keep all these smart and talented people happy with interesting and challenging projects,” she says.” We want to go after those projects, get the good clients and do good work.”

Right now, some of TCB Analytics’ clients include the City of Boston, Harvard Business School and IANS Research, an information security research company. The City of Boston enlisted Tanya to help understand data from Waze, a crowd-sourced traffic and navigation app, so that it can stay informed about abnormal traffic patterns. Tanya helped process pre-existing data and set up a system to collect and store new real-time data. With Harvard, Tanya is analyzing data on peer-to-peer lending from Lending Club, an online credit marketplace that allows investors to give loans to individuals or business. The project is trying to predict who might default on their loans so that investors can make more informed decisions about whom they fund. At IANS, Tanya is working to organize and present data about the security policies of various companies. She’s building dashboards using Tableau, an interactive data visualization service, so that IANS can fully explore the data it collected through surveys and then apply those lessons to future data collection strategies. “They can see the data in a whole new light,” Tanya says.

“I learned about programming languages and syntax, but I mostly learned how to solve problems,” she says. “Those were some of the more valuable takeaways from my classes, but I think the real edge came from the resources that were available to me, such as a great co-op advisor and excellent professors.”