Beyond the Numbers: Caitlyn’s Story
For Caitlyn, math is her ‘thing’ – from working on homework with her dad at the kitchen table, to high school calculus, to the UW-Green Bay Mathematics and Statistics Major. But Caitlyn isn’t just solving equations in her notebooks or conquering challenging courses. She’s calculating the thrust-to-weight ratio for NASA-sponsored program rockets, designing and executing experiments, and preparing for a future of changing the world with a career in mathematics.
Transcript: So ever since I was a kid, I always really liked math a lot, and my dad used to teach me math back when I was super little. And then once I got into high school, my Calc 1 teacher at my high school and he kind of rekindled that for me, and ever since then, math has just always been my thing. I came to UWGB originally doing engineering and realized that I loved the core of math within it more, so I steered back to math. I’d say my favorite course was probably Applied Regression Analysis. We just worked collaboratively a lot together, so it was very tight-knit, and I got to become very close to the other people in my class, which was super important to me. You know, Calc 3 sounds very daunting. You hear calculus, and everybody kind of gets a little nervous, but Calculus 3 can be really fun, and that was probably one of my favorites, too. At Rocket Club of UWGB, we compete in the Collegiate Rocket Launch. It’s sponsored by NASA, which is super cool, and using my mathematics, I typically will calculate the thrust-to-weight ratio for our rockets. My engineering friends that are within that group, it is incredible the number of things that I’ve learned outside of the realm of mathematics, too. So, I’d say most of my hands-on learning comes from the R Statistical Programming, which we’ve used for a couple different projects in a couple different classes. So, really, you can make your own data sets if you run your own experiments. I was in a course that was called Design of Experiments, where we basically did just that, where we ran our own experiment using a cell phone. We would either play games or scroll on social media, or basically anything you do on your phone. We’d measure battery percentage, would be lost during that time, and then we’d kind of use that to predict what would drain your battery the most. So, I think once I’m graduated and passed my first actuarial exam, ideally I’d like to go into risk management within the health field, and so I’m hoping to see myself somewhere in the future that I can be doing that.
