2022 Alumni Notes 2019-2021

2021

Ari Arango 

After graduating last spring, I spent time enjoying my last weeks in SLO before moving to Burbank. I am currently working as an analyst at Guitar Center where I carry out analyses and reports for automated email marketing campaigns. On the weekends, I usually go on trips to different places with my friends or play soccer in Sunday leagues. I hope that all my former professors and peers are doing well! 

David Barnett 

In August after graduation, I moved to San Diego with my best friend from Cal Poly. In September, I started as a data analyst at a freight tech company in Encinitas called Flock Freight. I make reports for the Customer Sales Department, and I mostly work in Snowflake (basically SQL) and a report editing software called Mode, with a little bit of Python and Google Sheets sprinkled in. Besides making reports, I've learned quite a bit about data warehousing, the logistics industry and general business practices. Life post-graduation has been great, but I still miss SLO and college. I'm looking forward to visiting again soon! 

Sahil Bobba 

Since I graduated last spring, I moved back to the Bay Area and began working at Pariveda solutions in San Francisco as a tech consultant working with full stack technology as well as data science.  

Brandon Chan 

I am currently working remotely as a data science associate at a digital marketing agency called Razorfish alongside my friend and fellow Cal Poly statistics graduate, Steven. I've also been applying to graduate data science and computer science programs for the upcoming fall semester, which I am very excited to start this year. Outside of work, I've been enjoying exploring all the parts of California I had never been to like Yosemite, Mount Shasta, the Redwoods and the northern coast. Looking forward to visiting Death Valley and Joshua Tree later this year! 

Siena Gibbs 

Post-graduation, I started working at RSM US LLP as a technology consultant. I moved to San Diego at the end of summer, and I love it here! I also completed my 200-hour yoga teacher training this past December and have been an instructor at CorePower Yoga since then.  

Jack Langston 

I started working at Deloitte as a consultant this summer and have been loving the job. My four years at Cal Poly have helped prepare me in a million different ways for my current role. After graduation I moved to New York City and currently live in Manhattan. I have been enjoying living in a new city but have been missing the constant California sun.  

Marisa Lee 

I graduated in June 2021, and man, do I miss Cal Poly WAY more than I ever expected to. If you're a current student, make sure to enjoy and make the most of your time at Cal Poly. 

In terms of my updates, I recently started my first full-time job. I applied to be a data scientist at the Department of Defense back in early January 2021 and went through an incredibly lengthy application and hiring process before finally having my first day on the job on January 31, 2022. So far, I'm having a lot of fun (yes, it's still possible in a government position!) and learning so many new things.  I'm lucky enough to live near D.C., and I still have so much exploring to do! 

Margot Murvihill 

After graduation, I moved to San Francisco for a few months to spend time with family and friends before moving to Seattle to start my career. I'm currently working as a software engineer at Twitter focusing on health data and metrics. We use lots of inferential statistics and machine learning to assess the prevalence of misinformation, violence, abuse and other health issues on the platform. I've been loving the cozy weather and beautiful nature in Seattle, and of course the delicious coffee. 

Mason Ogden 

After graduating in June 2021, I moved home for a while and did some statistical consulting for a family friend's company. In August, I started working at the local country club. I was doing both of those while also applying to about five data analyst/data scientist jobs per day online. In November, I got a job working as a business intelligence analyst for Alaska Airlines' Operations Analytics team. I've been working there for about two months now, and it's been great! I primarily work with airport operations and network operations, building and maintaining dashboards in Tableau and SQL Server Reporting Studio. Most of my days involve writing SQL query after SQL query (though I use R whenever I can!). I also moved into a small apartment just outside of downtown Seattle and can go into the office when I choose to, but mostly work from home. Here is a photo of me with the Fremont Troll in Seattle.  

Delaney Oliver 

After graduating I spent the summer traveling before moving into an apartment and starting a job in San Francisco. I am now working as a data analyst for Verana Health, a digital data startup in the healthcare industry. My work is on the clinical trials side, and I help to identify qualified patients and refer them to trials. Outside of work I have been enjoying finding new hobbies and discovering all the best spots in San Francisco! 

Ajay Patel 

I am living in Los Angeles, and I am working toward my master's degree in applied statistics at UCLA. So far, the material has felt very familiar; I feel that the Cal Poly Stats Program prepared me well! This past summer, I worked as a data science research intern at an aviation company (ATAC) in Santa Clara, and I currently work for the UCLA Women's Volleyball Team as their data analyst. 

Jonathan Shan 

After graduating from Cal Poly, I moved to Los Angeles to work full-time as a data scientist at Klarna and get my master’s in applied statistics at UCLA. Enjoying life in L.A., and I try to visit SLO as often as I can. 

Steven Taruc 

Post-graduation, I’ve been living back home in Northern California with family. Since August I have been working as a data science and analytics associate for Samsung Marketing. Also, I recently picked up golf and have been playing at local courses just about every weekend.  

Julia Van Boening 

Shortly after graduation, I started working for Raytheon Intelligence and Space as a proposal and pricing analyst. I have learned a lot of new skills, such as building complex models in Excel. I am remote right now, so I have been doing a lot of traveling. But I am excited to eventually work in person in either the Santa Barbara or L.A. office.  

 

Anish Yakkala 

I work as a software engineer at Apple and just relax with my cat in my free time. I also recently started to pick up drawing again as a hobby.  

2020

Layla Burgan 

I’m currently living in Davis and working full time at Vacaville High School, where I teach statistics and algebra. All my students are well acquainted with Rossman/Chance applets, and I try to hit as many of the GAISE guidelines as I can while I shape our next generation of statisticians. Every day of teaching brings new challenges and new triumphs, and I find myself using things I learned in STAT 410 and STAT 150 all the time! Hopefully I’m not getting too advanced with it, but I can say that the graduating class of 2022 at Vaca High will know all about Bayes Theorem. :)  

 

 

 

 

 

Maggie Ginzinger 

(See Joseph Lavond, Class of 2020.) 

Jenna Landy 

I'm in my second year working towards a Ph.D. in biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. I'm focusing on genetics and genomics and using data science methods in my research. I've loved living in Boston for almost two years now and have gotten the chance to explore all around the Northeast while hiking, skiing, lake-hopping and visiting friends! 

Joseph Lavond 

I am currently working through my second year of the Ph.D. program at UNC-Chapel Hill. I have successfully survived the qualifying exams at the end of the first year and am thrilled with the research and advisor I ended up with for the coming years. For those interested, my work surrounds adversarial machine learning, data poisoning and backdoor triggers to improve the robustness and security of deep learning models. Also, this semester is the first time I am teaching an entire course, and today I finished writing my first exam. I am in charge of an introductory course for mainly business majors, and I try every day to teach as much like Dr. Ross as I can manage.  

 Next, I am lucky to have a remote internship at Anthem this summer, and I can work from the much better California weather once again! I greatly miss both SLO, my classmates, and the faculty. Although I have made some lifetime friends at UNC, it will never compare to the time spent in and around the Stat Lab with friends and teachers. However, I am lucky enough to be living with my favorite classmate of all, Maggie Ginzinger, and I hope to see many of you at the wedding in a few years! If she doesn’t have time to respond to your email, she is working hard as an analyst at a startup healthcare company and has developed some key performance indicators that the company now depends on! I can’t wait to read the responses from the other students and hope to catch up with each of them individually soon. 

Maddie Lee 

I am currently working at Qualtrics as a data analyst for the Value Advisory team and plan to start this fall at the University of Utah to obtain my M.S. in business analytics.  

My husband and I had planned our wedding for May of 2021 but moved it to September because of COVID. We decided to have a small ceremony on our original May date in San Luis Obispo with our friends and family (a few stat majors included) and had our wedding celebration in September at the Utah Natural History Museum. Attached is a photo of our May SLO wedding and September wedding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regina Lisinker 

I moved to Minneapolis and started grad school in September. I am at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in the Statistics Education program (The same program Dr. Sabbag graduated from.) and loving it. Working with students has been a highlight: I'm the instructor on record for a section of an intro stat course in the Educational Psychology Department this semester. The snow is gorgeous, but the sub-zero temperatures are not nearly as nice — and I do miss being close to the beach. I'm enjoying living on my own for the first time and slowly exploring all that the Twin Cities have to offer! 

Kyle Reavis 

Quite a bit has happened since my last update. Most notably, I’ve started working as a software engineer at Workday and put the coding skills I learned at Cal Poly into practice. This will also mean moving soon to make the return to office easier, which I’m looking forward to doing as a big step in my post-college journey. It’s been a great experience so far and I’ve met a lot of awesome people along the way. Beyond that I’m spending my free time learning Esperanto (as of writing I have a 349 day streak on Duolingo), challenging my family to the daily Wordle, and slowly but surely making my way through the massive “watch later” queue I accumulated this past year. 

Sadie Rhen 

This past November, I started a new job working as a data analyst for BD. I’m currently building dashboards and predictive models to help hospitals monitor their infection rates and attempting to keep all my syntaxes straight while switching between R, Python, SQL and Tableau on a daily basis. I’ve been fortunate enough to still call San Diego home and have taken up rock climbing in my spare time.  

Austin Schwarz 

After graduating in 2020, I moved to Utah and worked at Park City Mountain Resort for the season as a lift operator. After the season ended, I started a job with a company called M Science as a data analyst working on a project called Sundial, a consumer transaction solution. When I’m not working, I’ve had a blast exploring all of the biking, skiing and hiking Utah has to offer throughout the seasons! 

Roy Zawadzki 

I'm in my second year of a statistics Ph.D. at UC Irvine. I'm studying causal inference in observational studies, particularly in healthcare, and machine learning methods in causal inference. I've been mostly busy with enjoying classes, internships, research and publishing a few papers from cardiology to quality of life. To see more of what I'm up to check out https://royzawadzki.github.io/ 

2019

Robert Cenon 

I am currently working at Apple as a data engineer and am living in the Bay Area. I support scientists across a few different disciplines by setting up data pipelines for their algorithm development.  

Joseph Hurst 

I’m still working at Google as a software engineer. Since COVID policies allowed me to work remotely, I spent the past year and a half traveling across the United States in my car while working from my laptop. I visited Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Florida, Louisiana, New Mexico and Arizona.

Izzy Kamrath 

In the past year, I became a homeowner and got promoted to senior business analyst in the Wireless Marketing department at AT&T! My new condo is located in Playa del Rey, a small beach town just three miles from LAX. I've been enjoying being a homeowner and only having a ten-minute commute to work. In my free time, I've recently started playing pickleball, and I've continued doing landscape and wildlife photography. 

Natalie Keelan 

I’m completing my master’s in computer science and artificial intelligence in March of this year. Afterward, I’m looking forward to starting my first job at a tech company as a software engineer as well as moving to Los Angeles. One of the most exciting things that happened this year is I became an aunt!  

Kien Nguyen 

I'm still living in North Carolina. I'm currently a safety data scientist at Lowe's where I work on improving and evaluating the statistical models that are used to reduce injuries. NC is a beautiful place but not so popular. I'm trying to recruit more people to come to NC, haha. I miss everyone in the department. Hope you all are good! 

Danielle Simmons 

After graduating from Cal Poly, I immediately began working at AAA Socal as an actuary, down in Costa Mesa. I have been here for three years now and am currently studying for yet another exam I need to take. I am now married to my high school sweetheart and have an Australian shepherd puppy named Maya, who is a deviant but amazing dog. For the next five years, I am going to pursue my career as an actuary until I get my fellowship and possibly buy a house with my husband, maybe start having children. And a quick fun fact, my husband and I are going to Hawaii at the end of the month for my 25th birthday! Woohoo! 

Danielle Stane 

Right after graduation in 2019, I began work as a data analyst in L.A. However, in the fall, I started pursuing my M.B.A at UC San Diego. My hopes are to gain business knowledge to supplement my statistics background from Cal Poly. While in graduate school, I am working as a consultant to the data analytics team at Torrey Partners. We focus mainly on providing expert analysis on employment-based lawsuits and court trials. Even though school and work keep me busy, I still find time to enjoy the beach and hikes around San Diego!