Cassandra Hung said one of the most meaningful moments during her tour of Wake Forest was when she had the opportunity to speak with mathematics professor John Gemmer.
“He was very kind and met with me, even as a senior in high school,” Hung said. “He introduced me to the department, and that was really important to me. Many of his classes have been some of my favorites.”
Hung quickly declared a major in applied mathematics. Before too long, however, she discovered an additional passion.
“My sophomore year, I started taking my first statistics classes, and they also became some of my favorite classes,” she explained. “I realized that this was another area where I felt like I really wanted to be mentored by these people… so I added it as a second major.”
The opportunity to form real relationships with her professors is what drew Hung to Wake Forest in the first place, and she has appreciated the caring guidance of the statistics faculty throughout her undergraduate career.
“There are a lot of schools where researchers are really important, but [it’s] the fact that professors here are really good at both valuing the work that they are doing academically, as well as teaching,” Hung explained. “I really found a department that felt very supportive… They want to mentor students and they want to teach students.”
She pointed in particular to her research with Professor Sarah Lotspeich as an experience that “changed [her] trajectory.”
“She’s been an absolutely incredible mentor,” Hung said of Lotspeich. “She’s really pushed me to grow as a statistician and understand what research means and what it could look like as a career. She’s pushed me outside of my comfort zone in terms of getting me to present and start to develop my own style of presentation.”
Beyond her connections with her professors, Hung’s studies are fueled by a foundational passion for the ideas she encounters in her classes.
“I’m very drawn to the idea that there’s so much information in the world that we don’t know what to do with or how to actually use it,” she explained. “Studying statistics has really allowed me… to apply [methods] directly to the world’s problems.”
She said her mathematical and statistical skillsets have helped her “better understand the world,” especially in conjunction with her other interests, like human health.
“I’ve always been interested in human health and medicine, and like a lot of people, I thought maybe I wanted to be a medical doctor before coming to college,” she explained. “But I realized that I felt much more compelled by quantitative evidence.”
Hung will continue to merge these two passions following her graduation, as she enrolls in a biostatistics graduate program at Johns Hopkins University. She said she has “a lot left to learn” and is thrilled to dive into the “rapidly growing field.”
“I’m really excited to see what it means to work with public health experts as a statistician,” Hung said. “I’m excited to be part of a cohort of peers that are as excited about this type of science as well.”
She again emphasized the influence of her mentors at Wake Forest in shaping her academic pursuits.
“I didn’t know exactly what I would be doing after college, and I think it was maybe a year or two ago [that] through on-campus summer research programs, I realized that this was something I really wanted to pursue,” Hung explained. “And now, I’m going to have the opportunity to develop a research project that is meaningful to me.”
