Sophia Baxendale

Full Name: Sophia Baxendale

Grad Year: ​2026

Degree/Program: ​MS in DACSS

Current Title: Institutional Research & Assessment Specialist

Current Employer: University of Massachusetts Amherst Assessment, Survey, and Effectiveness Research

What is the core mission of your role, or what is a major project you are currently working on? ASER leads institutional- and program-level assessment of campus experiences and student learning to support goals for educational effectiveness, strategic planning, and accreditation compliance. For me, I support survey, assessment, and program evaluation project work, so I am analyzing data from campus surveys like the Senior Survey and Dining Surveys. What makes this work really exciting to me is that a lot of the data we collect and analyze goes directly to campus leadership to improve experiences for all UMass students! 

Could you share the story of how you found this position? Did a specific networking contact, internship, or program resource help open the door?: During Emily’s professional development course, Krizstina Filep from UAIR (University Analytics and Institutional Research) came to talk about careers in institutional research. Emily helped to facilitate a connection, and I reached out to Krizstina through LinkedIn following the presentation. She let me know when the position was posted, I applied, and was one of two people hired for the position! 

Is there a specific skill, methodology, or lesson from your degree that you rely on to do your work successfully? I think that there are a lot of areas of the DACSS curriculum that lend well to analyst positions. In the hiring process, knowing how to interpret visualizations and read code was super valuable! I rely heavily on having learned code, different qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and the ‘language’ of data to quickly learn in this position. 

Looking back, what was a pivotal moment, favorite class, or faculty mentorship during your time in the program that directly shaped how you approach your career today? My favorite courses were the methods courses I took! I found the Qualitative Methods course with Crystal Paul to be validating in terms of different approaches to data collection, analysis, and defining expertise. I found the Quantitative Methods course with Omer Yalchin to be so helpful for someone coming from a soft science background – concepts that I’ve heard for years finally clicked and made sense both in a theoretical and applied way. This continued with Carey Stapleton’s Advanced Quantitative Methods course. It was challenging, and so important. Some of my colleagues use the advanced methods I learned from the class, which has been so helpful in terms of learning and understanding their desired outcomes. In my first few months in this role, I have worked extensively with qualitative data, which I feel confident in thanks to my professional experience and the coursework I completed with Dr. Paul.

If you could give one piece of advice to a student who is on the fence about starting the MS in DACSS, what would it be? I would advise the student to take advantage of the program. You can customize your projects to fit your interests / desired career path, and the instructors are a wealth of knowledge. In addition, data and research skills are more transferrable than a lot of people realize, and having those skills will make you a scrappier professional. You can go anywhere and do nearly anything with the baseline communication, interpretation, critical thinking, and analysis skills you nurture in this program. I’ll also add that I worked full-time through this program. It is friendly to professionals, and I found it to legitimize and validate the skills I had developed in the workforce.