By Lindsay Sherman
It’s a classic higher education story. Students enroll at a liberal arts college unsure of what they want to study or pursue as a career — often much to their parents’ dismay. Maybe they have a vague idea of what they want to do.
“I want to start my own company!” But should a budding entrepreneur study Business, Accounting, or Marketing, all of which are useful in entrepreneurship? “I’ve always dreamed of becoming a doctor!” Well, does it make more sense to major in Biology or Chemistry?
For many students, those first steps on the Hill might be intimidating and uncertain. But they soon learn that there is a fierce network of people looking to help them in those early days and beyond.
That has perhaps never been more obvious for many than in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has flipped the world upside down. Navigating a job search or starting that first job out of college in a mostly (or completely) remote environment is something not many were prepared for. And if lockdown restrictions took away the opportunity to complete internships, some students may have felt like they were never going to get ahead.
Luckily, that network of faculty, staff, and alumni keeps growing stronger every day. Kevin Webster ’19 and Dominic Byerly ’20 tackled all of these challenges head-on over the last couple of years. Now, Webster has a master’s degree and Byerly is pursuing his, and both are gainfully employed in industries that are different from what they pictured in their first year on the Hill, but have put them on paths to successful and lucrative careers.
How? Simple. It just took a little help from that faithful Green Terror network to help them find a fertile spot to put down strong roots, see their path a little more clearly, and grow into their potential. If you ask the mentors who helped them, that potential was there all along, whether they could see it or not. They just needed a little nurturing.
I originally came to play soccer, but I also wanted a smaller college. I really liked the more hands-on approach to learning and the opportunity to actually know my professors. I wanted to be an Accounting major, but I realized about a year and a half in that it actually wasn't what I wanted to do. The nice thing about the McDaniel Commitment is you get to take classes that get you out of your comfort zone. That gave me the freedom to explore what I wanted to do without feeling like I was forced down a certain path before getting a chance to really broaden my horizons.
Professor Kevin McIntyre. I really, really enjoyed my classes with him, especially Macroeconomic Theory. I loved seeing the big picture, the grand scheme of things, and how big economies interact with each other. Professor McIntyre’s classes felt different for me; I actually participated in his classes, I talked in them every day. I started getting close with him and asked him to be my advisor when I decided to go down the path of Economics as my field of study. He’s a really good guy, and we’re both into Star Wars, so our relationship became personal, too. He was always very honest with me, so we built a relationship on trust. If he told me to take a certain class, I would trust him and take it. That’s still true today, and led me to enroll in the Data Analytics graduate program at his recommendation.
First, I didn’t get to complete any internships during my time at McDaniel. I went to the internship fair my sophomore year and unfortunately didn’t get one. The spring of my junior year in March 2020, I went to it and then COVID shut everything down. That’s one of the reasons I decided to enroll in the Data Analytics graduate program. I had no experience in my field and I really wanted to be able to put myself in the best position possible and get a leg up. I also graduated a semester early by taking a test at a community college to get the last four credits I needed. I started searching for jobs in December 2020 into January and February 2021, but most of the callbacks I was getting were for sales jobs and I didn’t want to get into sales.
WHY DID YOU ENROLL IN THE DATA ANALYTICS GRADUATE PROGRAM?
When I told Professor McIntyre about my plan to graduate a semester early, he called me up and told me about the new Data Analytics program in Graduate & Professional Studies. He said he thought I’d be a good fit for it. He knows me, he knows what I’m interested in, and knows what I’m good at. Again, I trusted him. I spent a week or two looking into it and talked with my parents. I just thought with everything going on with COVID, the best option was to go into this grad program, continue my education, and further distinguish myself from other graduates in my field to get more employment opportunities in the future.
I started job searching again in April and I started working in firm-wide operations at Morgan Stanley at the beginning of July. Work so far has been completely remote, and I’ve been balancing that with my online, asynchronous grad school program. It’s nice to be able to go to work during the day and then I can manage my time and pace out my assignments in the evening for school. A lot of what I’m learning in school I’m already able to apply to work. Getting data sets, sorting them, running scripted statistics and regression models, and even just Excel skills. I’ve learned a lot more about Excel in class, which has already directly helped me at work.
My classmates are really smart and almost all of them already have jobs in the field. I learn a lot from our weekly discussion board posts and what they share. I think the Data Analytics master’s degree is going to bring me more lucrative job opportunities rather than just a bachelor’s in Economics and Business Administration. Right now, I’m just focusing on the experience I’m gaining at work and getting the best grades I can in my Data Analytics program so I can come out a year from now with my master’s degree, ready to succeed in the Data Analytics field.
Dominic was in my Macro Theory course and he was one of those quiet kids that sat in the back row, but I quickly noticed his scores were very, very good. I was like, “Who is this? I want to talk to this guy.” I found out he was interested in economics and business, and then he asked me to be his advisor. I’ve always been very intrigued by him.
He let me know that he was graduating early, but he was stuck in coronavirus purgatory: everyone was locked down and nobody was hiring. So, I told him about the Data Analytics program and how we had just designed an accelerated pathway from one’s undergraduate major into the graduate program, and I thought it would be a good opportunity for him. And now he’s gainfully employed, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see him on the Board of Trustees someday. Hopefully he remembers me and endows a chair or something with my name on it or gives us a big grant. He’s one of our graduates who we are going to know for a long time.
We are continuously asking — and encouraging our students to ask — what is this doing to help me understand what’s going on in the real world? If you’re working in a field that uses quantitative information, we can help you. It’s an entrepreneurial program and is designed to help people increase their options, to grow and provide opportunity in their current career but also give them options in other fields or industries. We have students working in health care, financial services, retail, logistics, and insurance. It’d be hard to find an industry nowadays that isn’t at some level collecting information and thinking about how to use it more efficiently. That’s the heart of data analytics.
The program also gives students a chance to partner with their employers and prove the worth of their education for their final project. We’ve asked them to come up with a data-using project that their employer wants done, a question they want to find an answer to. We want the students to employ the skills we’re equipping them with, but hopefully it’s also something their employer can monetize or put into action.
Anna Lissitz joined McDaniel as an adjunct in the Data Analytics program in October 2020. She earned her Ph.D. in Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation from the University of Maryland, College Park, and her primary research areas of interest are value-added modeling, multilevel modeling, learner analytics, and data-driven curriculum design.
Xuejing Duan started teaching in the Data Analytics program this fall. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Statistics and Research Methods from Virginia Tech (VT) in 2018. After graduating from VT, she worked as a biostatistician at the George Washington University for three years, where she was responsible for providing data analysis and statistics support for interdisciplinary research.
PROGRAM LAUNCHED: Fall 2020
FORMAT: Hybrid with a three-day residency per semester
NUMBER OF COHORTS: 4 (as of Fall 2021)
STUDENTS CURRENTLY ENROLLED: 112 (as of Fall 2021)
STUDENTS WHO ATTENDED FIRST RESIDENCY: 40 (August 2021)
ENROLLMENT GOAL: 150-200 students
TOTAL CREDITS: 30
PROGRAM COST: $19,800 ($660/credit)
AVERAGE COMPLETION TIME: 24 months
To learn more about Data Analytics and other graduate programs, go to mcdaniel.edu/academics/graduate-professional-studies.
I liked how small McDaniel was and how the campus was pretty isolated. There wasn’t any outside interference. I didn’t want any city schools. McDaniel felt like a community to me and it still sticks with me. Coming into college, I didn’t have an ounce of knowledge about what I wanted to do. I just knew I had to take science classes as prerequisites. I thought I was pretty good at Biology and then did some internships that solidified me wanting to be a doctor.
Molecular Biology with Dr. Susan Parrish. She really made me feel like I could do this if I just put a little work in. Even through the hard tests and massive amount of work, she was always there to support and guide me to success. I had several internships, including one at the Department of Forensic Science, where I was able to watch a medical examiner perform an autopsy. It was amazing to me how he knew everything about the body from head to toe. That experience shaped me and pushed me to take more Biology and Chemistry classes. I also studied abroad in Chile and studied health care there. I realized I wanted to be a doctor who helped patients in under-resourced areas.
My relationship with Dr. Dana Ferraris is really special. He’s like an uncle. He was somebody I could go to at the end of the day, somebody I can always trust and lean on. I still call him to this day and ask him about my 401(k) and benefits. He’s always open to talk to me and give me advice. He actually pushed me to pursue the work I’m doing now.
After I graduated, I pursued a master’s degree in Biology with a concentration in cancer biology prevention and control at the University of the District of Columbia. I graduated in April and was working at Walgreens, but I wasn’t trying to be a pharmacist or anything. Then I was asked to co-host the virtual Green Terror Talk on COVID Research on the Hill during Homecoming 2020 with Sam Hopkins ’80. I didn’t know anything about Sam before that, but Dr. Ferraris was on the panel and since I’d done research with him and Sam is a renowned researcher in the field, we were asked to host it. Afterward, someone from the Hill reached out to me and said Sam wanted to talk to me about a job opportunity, but I thought, “I know what I want to do. I want to be a medical doctor. I don’t want to do research.” Then Dr. Ferraris texted me and said, “Kevin, you need to get in contact with Sam. It would be very good for you.” I said, “Yeah, sure, I will.” Then I didn’t. [laughs] Eventually, I got in touch with him and he said he had an offer for me. Basically, he told me if I wanted to work with him at AskBio, they’d get me down to North Carolina as soon as possible. “If you want to leave, you can leave. But this is an option you always have on the table,” he told me. “I’m only putting this on the table for McDaniel alums like us.” I thought that was the kindest thing anybody had ever said, giving me an opportunity like this. So, I am a research associate here, and I screen individuals to see if they meet the requirements to be part of a study.
First of all, internships are what help support what you want to do. They help guide you. If you want to try something, try it. Do an internship. If you don’t like it, you go somewhere else. You don’t have to have it all figured out. And work the network. McDaniel is a small school. Sam reaching out to me as another alum, I had to take it. You feel honored that someone has reached out to you. I couldn’t turn it down. He is such a cool dude and has done so much amazing work in his career. Listen, we are decades apart, but because we have that McDaniel connection, we’re on common ground. He was open to the fact that I don’t know what I want to do. I can go on to the medical field or I can stay in research and he’s open to all of that. He still gave me the opportunity. Everything is still on the table for me. Research held very little weight for me for a long time. This experience has boosted it in my mind. I want to give it a year or so and then think about either pursuing my M.D. or Ph.D. It’s still early in this research job, but I think Ph.D. may be the way I go. At the end of the day though, “Dr.” is still what I want in front of my name. That’s my goal.
All 40 of the trustees have an incumbent burden to not only sit on the board itself but to be actively involved in the college. That means every time I go to campus, I want to talk to the science faculty and find out who their best students are and what they want to achieve. We talk a great deal about being a college that changes lives. If I have the ability to create an employment opportunity for our graduates, then by all means, I’m going to match our best graduates with their post-college experiences to openings in my current companies. If we as a community want to be successful, we’ve got to recruit our own and give them opportunities to launch their careers.
Dana Ferraris was very excited about him; then I talked to Kevin. He was enthusiastic, he had good communication skills, he wanted to continue his education, and he had future goals for a career in science. Plenty of people have knowledge, but if they’re not excited by what they know or the chance to follow that path, I can’t instill desire in anyone. I let Kevin know that this job opportunity could enhance his skills from a research perspective and then he could use that to enhance a job application in the future. I told him to simply take the chance, advance this stage of his career, and see what he could learn from it.
For science students, any laboratory experience a student can gain at the undergraduate level is transformative and shows them whether a career in research is something they want to contemplate. Learning from an academic perspective is one thing, but doing is something entirely different. If you want to be successful, reach out to an alum in your related field. See if they can make connections for you to bridge you into the working world. When you just come out of college, you have no idea how complex and how competitive the world is. Having an alum who is experienced in your field to help you navigate through the initial transition from college to the working world can be critical to your future success.
Kevin was in my Organic Chemistry I class. His grades were decent, but he didn’t say much in class. Yet in lab, he was Mr. Outgoing, an enthusiastic personality. I asked him whether he was interested in lab work. I don’t think it was even on his radar as something that was a possibility beyond a requirement for his major. But once the summer research experience started, he was always striking up conversations about anything and everything, trying to get everybody laughing. Far and away, one of his best skills is his ability to communicate with people.
After the summer research program, I told him, “Kev, you have a skill set now. You know what it’s like to work in a lab as a full-time job. It’s all about learning on the fly and applying everything.” Then Sam Hopkins reached out to get in touch with Kevin. I texted him and just said, “Even if you don’t want to pursue a job in industry, it can never hurt to have a contact like this.” I’m sure he’ll be good at whatever he does, but I think he’s going to enjoy this job, and he might get comfortable and want to stay in industry. My gut says he’s going to go for a Ph.D. instead of the M.D. when all is said and done.
It’s not like Sam has 150 kids per year that he has this connection to. If Sam reaches out, you’re maybe one of 10 kids that could qualify for this job. That’s exactly what the McDaniel Commitment is all about: setting your career trajectory correctly. Keep making those connections, meet as many people as you can in the workforce. And then give back. I tell my students I am like The Godfather. One day, sometime in the future, I’m going to ask them for a favor and they have to respond, the way that Sam Hopkins continues to respond to McDaniel.