Baseball Personal Statement

Growing up, two things in my household were certain: mathematics and baseball. Being the son of a mathematics and statistics professor, the subjects themselves were never in short supply; however, it was not the immediate exposure of statistics that instilled my love for the science; it was baseball. Every summer, my dad was the coach for the legion baseball team, and when I myself was not playing, I helped keep the book for my dad’s team. Baseball is one of those sports that is incredibly statistics driven. There is an entire science that is dedicated to the analysis of the sport called sabermetrics. When I had kept track of the book for my dad, the statistics that I had kept track of were: pitching efficiency, earned run average, batting
average, and fielding percentages. After keeping the book for eight summers and playing the sport itself for eleven, the foundation of my statistical journey was laid. Getting into high school, I had fast tracked my mathematics courses in order to take collegiate courses my junior and senior years of high school. My sophomore year was the first year where I had taken a dedicated statistics course: that being AP Statistics. The curriculum covered the general topics of the field of statistics. Regression analysis and hypothesis testing I found to be the most interesting. My senior year, I had the unique experience to take a statistics course that was taught by my dad. This class, Probability and Statistics, was taught by an alternative means, utilizing various candies to represent probabilities and using that data for proportion hypothesis testing. This alternative method of statistics further sparked my passion for “non-traditional” statistics. As my time as an undergraduate is coming to a close very quickly, I am aspiring to further my education in the field of statistics. During my undergraduate years, I have worked as a teaching assistant, learning assistant, and a tutor in both statistics courses and mathematics courses. In having helped teach students about these different courses, I have been challenged by needing to not only know the material, but understand it on a deeper level. Even though I will graduate with a minor in statistics, I believe that I have much more to learn. By earning my postgraduate degree, I hope to work in either the field of sports statistics or business analytics. In either of these fields, I hope that I will be able to spread my enthusiasm for the field onto other who may not have had positive experiences with statistics or mathematics in general.