As we approach Father's Day 2015, I recall that many years ago when I was in high school and college my dad had lots of ideas about what I should do with my life. Many of these career ideas were influenced by whatever recent magazine article he had read. Among his suggestions were oceanographer, Japanese translator and dermatologist. I don’t think I gave one of them more than a half second of thought.

But SAS Student Ambassador Catherine LaChapelle, recently graduated from the University of North Carolina, has more sense than me. Or at least her dad, a SAS R&D team member, had better suggestions than mine.

In this video, recorded earlier this year at SAS Global Forum, Catherine explains how she has taken her dad Carl’s suggestions about a career in data science and her own interest in politics to create a mashup career plan. Her undergraduate degree from UNC is in political science and her honors thesis uses SAS software to analyze how public sentiment about crime correlates to actual incarceration rates over the years.

Now, she’s set to pursue a Master’s degree in advanced analytics at North Carolina State University. The NCSU Institute for Advanced Analytics just announced that it had a 100 percent placement rate for the second year in a row. And average starting salaries for the new grads was over $91,000 a year after each had interviewed with 12 employers on average. Good move, Catherine! A good job with the data scientist career advice, Carl!

I wonder what an oceanographer pulls down these days.

To learn more, check out this series of articles about data scientists, which includes an interview with a university leader on preparing a new generation for leadership in a big data world – and much more.