Math takes alumna from Disney to Cirque du Soleil

When Courtney Brown ’20 was in second grade, she was deemed the class “Math-Fact Queen.” It’s one of her earliest memories of when she realized that math was her thing.

Today, she’s taken her math skills and love of the entertainment world to one of the most well-known, premier circuses — Cirque du Soleil.

Working in data analysis and revenue management, Brown is responsible for crunching the company’s numbers and making sense of what the data is telling them. She reviews data of ticket sales, show revenues, and marketing tactics to identify trends and inform leadership. For example, if the company puts out an offer for a Black Friday sale, she’ll analyze how it performed. Did it help them sell more tickets? How did this year’s campaign compare to last year’s?

“The job of an analyst is pretty much to help make other people’s lives easier,” said Brown. “I help people make sense of the ‘So what?’ ‘Why should I care?’ This job is knowing how to take broad data in its messiest, ugliest form and making it accessible to others.”

Brown moved to Las Vegas in the summer of 2021 to initially work in the casino industry before making the switch to Cirque du Soleil four months ago. While earning her bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Furman, she learned she could combine her math skills with entertainment.

“I wanted to use my skills in a way that helped people have fun,” she said.

A pivotal experience for her was Math and the Mouse. The three-week study-away experience is part of Furman’s May Experience Semester, a key engaged learning element of The Furman Advantage, the university’s signature educational framework. For three weeks, Brown and other students took condensed math courses at Walt Disney World, taught by Professor Liz Bouzarth, Professor John Harris and Professor Kevin Hutson of the mathematics department. Students also designed projects, collected data throughout the Disney parks, and analyzed and presented their findings at the end of the study-away experience.

“My group looked at the impact of adding a single-rider line to Space Mountain to reduce wait times and increase throughput,” she said.

Brown and her groupmates would study the queue for the coaster, counting how many cars had empty seats. They compared the wait times for Space Mountain with other rides that had single-rider lanes and found that Space Mountain was running at about 60-percent capacity and could benefit from adding a single-rider option.

Courtney Brown ’20

To this day, that project is still one that Brown is most proud of. It also showed her a viable career path.

“I went into it knowing at a minimum it would be a fun few weeks, and it’d be insightful,” she said. “Ultimately, I wanted to find my career path, and for me, that was the game changer.”

Brown earned her bachelor’s degree in 2020 and continued on to Wake Forest University to earn a Master of Science in Business Analytics in 2021. Looking back, she gives credit to Furman’s sense of community and small class sizes.

“A lot of my classes were 10 to 20 students. We all had really great relationships with the professors. My friends who went to big schools were surprised my professors knew my name,” she said. “It felt like we had very personalized, individual guidance from them and that was so valuable.”

Brown, who had seen every Cirque du Soleil show even before she started working there, still loves going to the shows — a perk of the job. Her favorite is “O,” a water-based, diving and acrobatics show.

“The whole stage is a giant pool. I was a Cirque fan for years before this job; I actually saw my first Cirque show at Disney in about 2010. It’s cool how things have come full circle.”