Solving for X
Hailey’s positive experiences at a small-town high school caused her to seek out a college where community was a primary factor. Since graduation from Northwestern, she stays connected with the friends she made in her dorm, classes, service projects and on the track and cross country teams. Now with a master’s degree and an internship in animal health care economics, Hailey works in a new community—that of data science professionals.
As a data science intern at Isomark Health, what is your role?
My role primarily involves working with breath data used in detecting viral and bacterial diseases in bovines prior to the onset of symptoms. I work on cleaning and studying data from our partners and helping to build prediction models that indicate if an animal is healthy or sick.
What do you enjoy about your current position?
I really enjoy working with other professionals in the field of data science, as we mostly all come from different academic disciplines. It’s interesting to see how others approach a problem, based on their training and expertise, and I learn a lot about the problems we’re working on from a variety of viewpoints.
How did your Northwestern education prepare you for your current position and your master’s program in statistics at the University of Wisconsin?
Working with Dr. Schon on real-world problems at NWC helped me gain an early appreciation for how complex and messy data can be outside of an academic setting. After taking graduate-level courses at UW, I could easily bridge the gap between textbook knowledge and the work for my master’s and now my work for Isomark. Regarding Dr. Schon and Dr. Jongerius, I don’t think many people realize how rare it is to have a female math professor, let alone a female department chair and head of institutional research. They both serve as role models to me as I enter the STEM field.
What do you appreciate most about your Northwestern education?
I really appreciated how sincere and personable the faculty and staff were at NWC. I still stay in touch with many professors and think my education was enhanced greatly because it was easy to approach faculty for help in better understanding the course material. I really enjoyed the people I met in all areas of my NWC experience.
In what ways did Northwestern faculty impact your faith?
Statistics is one of the most unchanging sciences out there. However, Dr. Huffman taught us that the true mean and standard deviation for a population is known only to God. Maybe this means God is the greatest statistician, or maybe it means we’re trying to study things we can never know. Regardless, it just goes to show how powerful and all-knowing our God is.
