“The most interesting part about majoring in statistics is that although each class uses the same basics, the different lenses that they use to look at statistics makes it feel like almost an entirely new subject,” says recent alumna Marissa Baietto.
Baietto graduated with dual bachelor’s degrees in statistics and data science and an actuarial science certificate in Fall 2025.
Her favorite (and most challenging class) was Empirical Methods for the Computational Sciences (STAT 4830) which “taught the ‘why’ behind many of the concepts that I had already recognized, and it dove deeper into these concepts than any of my previous classes.”
Baietto identifies this course as one that made her a stronger statistician, which is helpful in her current role as a Network Strategy Management Trainee at BNSF Railway. Within her role, she is modernizing data reporting systems.
A large percentage of her current role is rebuilding reporting systems in Python, which includes teaching artificial intelligence (AI) tools to convert and scale the data into hundreds of dashboards.
If there are data questions, Baietto also gets to use SQL to identify what is happening with the data and how to present it correctly on the dashboard.
In the future, her role will transition to creating new performance metrics and dashboards for reporting. Her statistics background will be especially useful in strengthening reporting.
Baietto credits her eventual career placement to a series of opportunities provided by Iowa State, starting as a freshman. She was part of the First-Years Honors Mentor Program and got to perform undergraduate research.
Her research mentor provided a recommendation for an internship shared by the department. This led to being co-author on an annual report at her internship. Her next internship was a result of a conversation at the Business, Industry, and Technology Career Fair.
In addition to the opportunities shared by the department, Baietto appreciates the tight-knit nature of the department. Students often overlap in courses throughout their undergraduate program, which made it, “easy to find friends.”