2016 Alumni Notes Graduation Years 2013-14

2014

Heather Adams

Since graduating I had a daughter who is now 18 months. Her name is Ariana, and yes I got the idea of her name from former student Ariana Montes. I also moved down south to Lake Elsinore, Calif.

I have been working for TurnKey Marketing in Lake Elsinore as an SEO specialist since Oct. 2015. I manage 22 clients’ SEO, which includes creating custom HTML pages with original content and managing their websites. This company is a digital marketing company for automotive dealerships. We do SEO, PPC, social management, social ads, email blast and direct mail for dealerships all over the country.

I am currently in the process of creating a new position within the company, marketing statistician, in which I will use data driven marketing strategies to improve our marketing efforts and improve our customers ROI.

Kyle Beekman

I am working as a data analyst/programmer for Pacific Metrics in Monterey. I work analyzing testing data from the Defense Language Institute. I live a few blocks from the beach and watched the Broncos win the super bowl. Life is good.

Henry Bongiovi

I’m just hitting my second year as a loyalty and travel products analyst at Hawaiian Airlines, and I am enjoying it 98.8% as much as I did when I started. However, with the margin of error in my calculation this slight decline in enjoyment is negligible. In any case, living in Hawaii has been pretty sweet. There’s not much to complain about besides the lack of proper Mexican food or BBQ and the occasional hurricane. Aside from this, I’ve been using my flight benefits as much as I possibly can to travel around the world to get lost and eat foreign foods. If anyone reading this finds themselves with nothing better to do in Honolulu, don’t be afraid to look me up!

Ashley Chandler

I'm still living in San Francisco and working in Mercer's Health and Benefits consulting practice. I recently became a credentialed actuary (ASA) and am enjoying some time off from studying before I pursue my fellowship (FSA). I spend my work hours consulting for employers on their health and benefits strategies and am really enjoying the diversity of work that both the health sector and the consulting field provide.

Samantha Dellinger

This past year has been filled with so many exciting things, from moving in with my boyfriend (who also went to Cal Poly) and getting a puppy, to a promotion at work. I am still working at LifeStreet and have been here for a little over two years now, and I am now the manager of our Supply Operations team. I have very much enjoyed the increased responsibility within my role and learning the skills needed to manage not only my own work but the work of others as well. This past year I also attended the Cal Poly career fair, and it was such a blast being on the other side and being able to help future Cal Poly alumni find their first post grad jobs.

Sasha Kravets

After graduating Cal Poly, I went to UC Santa Barbara to pursue my master’s in applied statistics. After my first year of graduate school, I took a biostatistics internship at Novartis in Basel, Switzerland. I had an amazing experience living in Switzerland and spent my weekends traveling around Europe and making some really amazing friends and connections. Once I finished my internship I came back to UCSB and completed my master’s degree in December 2015. After that I had the opportunity to come back to the wonderful Statistics Department at Cal Poly as a lecturer. I really enjoyed the experience of teaching and getting to spend some time in SLO again.

After lecturing at Cal Poly for two quarters, I decided to make a big change and moved to Boston, Mass. Currently I'm working as a biostatistician at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute where I work in Thoracic Oncology and Imaging. I'm loving the work I do, and it's very rewarding. So far Boston is amazing, and the weather has been great. I'll let you know how I feel about the weather once the snow storms start.

Ariana Montes

Chris Moore (2013) and I were both statistic majors at Cal Poly and we are now married. We live in San Mateo and both work in the tech industry.

Chris is currently working at the mobile gaming company, Gree International, Inc., in San Francisco. He is a business intelligence analyst and spends most of his days writing SQL queries and analyzing big data to help make the mobile games more successful.

I recently got promoted to business analyst with my current company, Apttus, in San Mateo. I am in meetings all day designing, solutioning and implementing functionality for high profile clients.

Chris and I are very grateful for our experience in the Stat Department at Cal Poly. We are successful in our current jobs thanks to what we learned from our esteemed statistics professors.

Julia Schedler

I entered the third year of my Ph.D. at Rice University this year. I am working with Katherine Ensor on spatio-temporal statistics applied to air quality data. Last summer I had the pleasure of giving a short course in spatial statistics to Rice's Kinder Institute for Urban Research. I will be giving it again in November to researchers in the Texas Medical Center, which is the largest in the world.

I am also completing Rice's new Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning, which has been eye opening and rewarding. I recently presented this poster on data science education just for fun and based on teaching methods utilized in statistics and computer science, and how they have been put together to teach a data science course.

On a more personal note, we recently got a dog. Her name is Rita, but we usually call her Chompy or Ritaloid because of her abundant puppy mouthing and tendency to careen around our small apartment like an asteroid (or at least how I imagine an asteroid). The cats have had very different reactions to her presence.

Allison Wiener

After graduation I went straight to The Clorox Company in the Bay Area. I joined as a business intelligence developer on the IT insights team, was promoted to an IT solution engineer, and recently joined the Marketing Global Insights Data Science team as a data science analyst in Oakland.

My undergrad statistics degree paired with two years of technical BI developer experience has prepared me for this move to the data science team, and I could not be more excited. We are working on things like

predicting customer lifetime value for our brands like Burt’s Bees

• targeting advertising based on external drivers like events like weather, flu, seasons, etc.
• micro-targeting to consumers online based on cookie and demographic information such as location, lifestyle (ex: luxury, college, etc), behavior (that allows us to predict things like age and gender), and much more
• building recommendation engines for websites
• demand driver analysis
• unstructured data mining – text analytics of data from social media, blogs, reviews, etc.
• machine learning

I’ve come to find out that data science work could not get any cooler. Also, as I write this I just got an email from our chief marketing officer titled "Clorox just won the most prestigious award for marketing analytics in the world.” We were just awarded the 2016 ANA Genius Award for Analytics Adoption proving how cutting edge this type of work is, and how exciting it is to be involved. I love my job, and to stay current I’m continuing to take online classes around further data science concepts like text mining and analytics.

Cal Poly’s statistics program and degree can open some crazy doors in your career, and the location and people make it a fantastic place to spend four years. Thank you to all of the professors and those involved with keeping this program great. Life is good over here in The East Bay.

Dana Williamson

I have recently started on my master’s in statistics at Cal State East Bay. I am living in the Bay, and tutoring at a local high school with their AVID program, encouraging students to pursue an undergraduate degree — and showing them how fun statistics is!

2013

Maro Aguilera (Tsiifte)

Soon after I graduated from Cal Poly, I had to leave the country to renew my visa but not before I met my husband who followed me here. We have been living and working in Cyprus and waiting for the right moment to move back. I am working as a statistical operations analyst for Nielsen, and my department focuses on what consumers buy in the Middle East. I am now in charge of the monthly reports for the United Arab Emirates clients. I am also the proud mother of two beautiful and energetic sons.

Thank you and hi to everyone!

Katie Eng

After leaving Cal Poly, I obtained my master’s in statistics from Oregon State University. Now, as a statistician at W.L. Gore & Associates, my primary responsibilities include collaborating and consulting with engineers and scientists and presenting and teaching statistical concepts and tools to Gore associates.

Kelsey Grantham

Since graduating from Cal Poly with a major in math and a minor in statistics, I have been living in Sydney, Australia. I finished a master’s in applied statistics at Macquarie University and am now about to finish my second year working as an epidemiological modeler for the Burnet Institute. I have conducted modeling studies with country governments to determine the optimal way to allocate available HIV funding to have the biggest impact on the epidemic. And I’ve also worked on developing and testing new approaches for estimating the number of new HIV infections over time in a country. Last year, I got to assist with workshops in Tunisia and Colombia, working with country teams to produce updated estimates of their HIV epidemics. Starting in 2017, I’ll be a doctorate student in disease modeling at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Hector Herrera

Master statistician and walking Yelp app. Hung up the start-up hat and moved into the corporate world, working for a national multi-line, government contract, healthcare organization. Daily tasks include: project management (babysitting), providing in-depth analyses (poking around in the data warehouse), training (somehow I've managed to become the corporate trainer in our reporting platform: fake-it till you make it right?), traveling to our health plans across the U.S. (free food and flight/hotel points), dashboard design (spending hours and hours discussing fonts and colors), and therapist (listening to my cubie: cubie - the gal that sits next to me and drinks too much wine). After work I spend my time researching current events (Netflix), deciding what type of pet I want (watching cat and puppy videos on YouTube), and expanding my database (dining out). Oh yeah, I also started running regularly and am shooting for my first marathon in April.

Debbie Huang

I had an amazing time visiting Thailand and Maui this year. While vacationing in Maui, I became engaged! We are getting married next year and going to Costa Rica for our honeymoon. I randomly bought a sewing machine and decided to learn to sew on my own (attached is a picture of a dress I sewed along with a matching bandana for my corgi). I recently became interested in Olympic lifting, and I'm planning to compete in a meet next year.

Chelsea Kern

Since graduating three years ago, I am in my second full-time job. In August 2015, I switched career paths from an Investment Analyst in Finance into Marketing at high-tech company, Juniper Networks, in Silicon Valley. At Juniper, I use data to provide business and market intelligence to various marketing and sales teams. In May this year, I moved from Fremont to Discovery Bay, where I bought my second home!

Max Klingman

I have been working at LBN, a digital marketing agency in Los Angeles for two years alongside Cal Poly stats alumnus Mat Adams.

Chris Moore

See Ariana Montes, 2014

Suzanne Nelson

After graduating, I went on to attend Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine’s accelerated biostatistics master’s program. I graduated in December 2014 with my master’s in biostatistics, then accepted my current position working for the Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Center in Denver, Colo. I have been working for almost two years as a statistical research specialist providing statistical support for our post-market drug safety surveillance studies. Our major focus is on the safety of over-the-counter, prescription and illicit drugs, with an emphasis on the abuse and misuse of opioids. I have really enjoyed living in Denver and have been taking advantage of all of the outdoor activities Colorado has to offer (hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, and skiing). An added perk of living in Denver is getting to hang out with Julia Maddalena, one of the first friends I made in STAT 150 back in 2009.

This picture was taken during a backpacking trip near Aspen, Colo.

George Shannon

After graduating, I have worked at KPMG for the last three years as a technology consultant. My group at KPMG serves our clients by performing system integrations / system implementations following the software development lifecycle (SDLC). My team and I specialize in business intelligence, providing our clients with services including data management, data governance, data warehousing, data analytics, report creation and generation and development of ad-hoc reporting functionality. In addition to my consulting work, I also lead our Sacramento office’s campus recruiting efforts and take as many opportunities as I can to head back down to Cal Poly to recruit the world’s best and brightest students.

After working and living in Honolulu for two years I currently live Sacramento. As my initial interest in statistics came from my obsession with sports and analyzing statistics, most of my free time involves the sports world. I enjoy following all of my Bay Area sports teams and playing intramural basketball, golf, ice hockey and softball.

Kaity Sutter

I currently live in Green Bay, Wis., working as an actuary at an insurance company. Yes, I really did just say Green Bay, land of the Packers. The two most asked questions since I've moved are: How do you like the cold? Why did you move out of California? To answer your questions, yes, it's cold. It's not called the frozen tundra for nothing. But the seasons bring lots of new adventures. As for why I moved out of Calif., it was for the job, but I've decided I love my life out here and want to stay. Oh, and the job is pretty sweet too.