People / Alumni / Class of 2023
Sam Swain earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Statistics (High Distinction) and Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During his time at Illinois, he studied topics such as machine learning, statistical and probability theory, and statistical modeling. Sam also spent a semester as a course assistant for Statistics 430 (Python and Data Science). After receiving his degree he took a sabbatical during which he worked on improving/acquiring knowledge in Python, SQL, machine learning, and Ethereum mining. As a course assistant for Statistics 430 (Python and Data Science), Sam held twice per week office hours to help teach students Python, manage/analyze data within Python utilizing Pandas/NumPy, and visualize that data with Matplotlib. For one of his favorite final projects, he created a searchable web app that presented grade distributions for each professor’s classes at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Sam also interned at Interim HealthCare of Downstate Illinois as an analyst. Interim HealthCare is a home care agency that provides in-home help with activities of daily living and in-home skilled nursing care. While at Interim, Sam created an XGBoost classification model to predict whether any given client would return a margin above or below forty percent. He also used data to help the owners determine viable pricing for clients who needed little care per week, allowing the company to capture a market that most area competitors turn away from. Sam is excited to attend Northwestern University to deepen his knowledge of analytics, apply his skills to industry-led projects, and share his love of Data Science with his fellow MSiA* classmates, faculty members, and industry members. Outside of academics, Sam enjoys being physically active, is a former semi-professional Fortnite player, and plays guitar.
*later renamed MS in Machine Learning and Data Science
