Srika Raja became interested in majoring in statistics after finding COVID-19 graphs, analysis, and predictive modeling interesting. Initially from India, she chose Iowa State University because of its ranking and long history in statistics.
Srika graduated with a double major in statistics and data science and a minor in applied mathematics in December 2025. She is now applying to graduate schools to pursue a Ph.D. in statistics. Choosing to pursue research for her future career is attributed to her time at Iowa State, “Coming to Iowa State changed my career path completely”
Srika had three types of internships as an undergraduate student, all of which impacted how she planned and determined her future career path.
Her first internship was as a data science intern for Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. As an intern, she developed a tool for rural grocery store owners to determine the best store location based on competition analysis. During this internship, she learned that she enjoyed programming, saying “With how massive datasets are today, programming skills matter a lot.”
Following this internship, she began taking programming classes, leading her to add a second major in data science. These courses helped her to make a connection between programming and statistics, “Okay, data science is cool.”
Srika’s second internship was a research experience with Associate Professor Somak Dutta. Working under his guidance, she helped develop an R package (pPCA) to do principal component analysis. It helps biology researchers analyze extremely large genetic datasets that are often too big to fit on a standard computer. Traditional methods can't handle data at this scale, but their package makes these analyses both faster and feasible on regular machines, without the need for high-powered computing resources. The package is now published on CRAN, where researchers worldwide can access and use it.
The research with Dutta helped Srika to learn about being a researcher, which she realized she enjoyed. Prior to her research internship, Srika was working as a tutor and Supplemental Instruction leader, but she switched to being a part-time research intern with Dutta after the summer internship concluded.
Srika’s third and final internship was with John Deere as a data science intern. As an intern, she built dashboards in R, which used skills from her previous semester’s data science coursework and previous internships. The dashboard compared John Deere dealer profile strengths worldwide.
Srika continues to work with Dutta after graduation, and they are now developing their research into a research paper. Her work with Dutta was pivotal in helping her decide to pursue a research career. Her Ph.D. research interest is high dimensional statistics and developing better methods for analyzing modern data.