Lyndonville native Katherine King’s ties to the University of Vermont go way back — to 1859, when her paternal great-great-grandfather, Urban Woodbury, graduated with a degree in medicine. He went on to become a Civil War hero, Burlington mayor and the state’s 45th governor.

“UVM was always one of my top college choices,” says King ’14, who was a recipient of one of U VM’s Green & Gold Scholarships, a merit award that’s given to the academically strongest rising high school senior in every Vermont secondary school.

Although she entered U VM as an undeclared major, a calculus class with Professor Thomas Rogers helped set her on a career path. “I realized that studying math was where my heart and passion was,” she says.

In her first statistics class, with Professor Jeffrey Buzas, she discovered how numerical data could be applied to solve problems in healthcare, a field she had previously contemplated for a career.

“I always wanted to work in the healthcare field to make a difference in people’s health and lives, but I just couldn’t quite see myself as a nurse or doctor,” she says. By introducing his work on Vermont Oxford Network ’s data concerning outcomes of improvement efforts in neonatal care units, “Professor Buzas showed me the perfect way to fit my mathematical mind into the healthcare field.”

Working with Buzas on her honors thesis, she gained additional research experience. “We looked into a relatively new area of statistics, functional data analysis (FDA), and we worked with weather data collected throughout the entire United States over the last 64 years,” she says.

Outside the classroom, King tutored students in the Learning Coop and developed her skills in teaching and leadership. “I expanded from just tutoring in specific subject areas to learning-skills tutoring, weekly math help sessions and eventually training all new tutors,” she says.

In the spring of her junior year, she pursued her goal of studying abroad. At Bond University in Australia, “I was able to take classes not available at U VM, including Criminal Profiling, taught by Wayne Petherick, an author of many profiling books. I also was able to travel all around Australia and got to see parts of New Zealand, Fiji and Indonesia.”

When considering life after college, King realized she needed a graduate degree to pursue work in complex statistical analysis. Buzas encouraged her to apply for CEMS’ Accelerated Master’s Program. In Professor Richard Single’s course on Applied Statistical Genetics, she worked on projects involving “real genetic studies, and we were able to reproduce results from many recent studies and even find patterns of our own.”

Her UVM experience paid off once she hit the job market. After hearing from an alumna and two professors about a job at the Mayo Clinic, she landed a position as a statistician, working with cardiovascular surgery and other clinical statistics groups.

Her advice for CEMS students? “Network, especially early on,” she says. “It can be a scary word for most people, especially for those of us who fit the introverted mathematician stereotype such as myself, but it can also change your college experience.”