After beginning in the College of Business and participating in a job shadow, I realized Finance and Accounting was not what I was interested in pursuing – I wanted to research and develop financial metrics and models, perform deep dive analysis to identify why certain trends were occurring, and create solutions to address them. I had a great conversation with the statistics undergraduate adviser about changing majors, and discovered that not only was statistics the right path for me, but there were a wide variety of internships available in Research Park to supplement my education and allow to gain exposure to different industries.

Over the course of my internship, I worked to create and enhance various parts of an enterprise model estimating future financial risk. My internship allowed me to contribute to real projects, as well as provided my first opportunity to present at a global analytics conference. Upon finishing my Bachelor’s, I accepted a full time job continuing work from my internship while simultaneously pursuing my Master’s to gain a deeper understanding of more advanced topics. After spending 6 years in actuarial research, I expanded my career into a different area of financial services, shifting from insurance to banking. I now develop analytical solutions to enhance recovery efforts through the leveraging of new techniques and data. As a part of the Strategy and Analytics team, I collaborate with various stakeholders to identify key insights that help us better understand our customers, and design strategies to enact our discoveries.

Research park has a vast amount of opportunities for students to obtain real world experience, making the connection between what is taught in the classroom and how it can be applied in practice. The Statistics department highlights these opportunities to students, as well as prepares them to be successful in them by offering statistical computing classes. The greatest asset the University offers is cross-functional learning – to the extent students can, they should take classes in other disciplines (i.e. Economics, Chemistry, Physics, Psychology) to understand the variety of areas statistics can be applied.

‘13 – BS in Economics and Statistics
’15 – MS in Statistics