Alumni Profile: Bridget Sands, A.B. '24

When the pandemic sent Bridget Sands home midway through her second semester in early 2020, one of the first things she missed was sports. Her mother grew up in Massachusetts, so Sands was raised as a Boston sports fan in Westchester, New York, much to the disagreement of most of her Yankees-loving friends. She played sports throughout her childhood, and she loved gathering with her family to watch them on TV. Her Harvard application essay was about baseball – her senior thesis would be as well, a few years later. 

Though students were allowed back on campus for the Fall 2021 semester, Sands decided to take a gap year. Stepping away gave her a chance to hone in on her life goals.

“I already knew that I was likely going to study applied math, and I started thinking about what professional route I might go down,” she said. “I started to realize how important sports were to me, so I took what I studied and what I loved, and I looked for the intersection.”

During that gap year, Sands spoke with numerous Harvard alumni and professionals about how to build a career in sports. She interned with the Hartford Athletic soccer team and Worcester Red Sox minor league baseball team, then returned to campus with a newfound focus. She declared her concentration in applied math, with a focus on data science, and a secondary in computer science at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). She became a hockey writer for The Harvard Crimson, and also joined the Harvard Sports Analytics Collective, a SEAS-affiliated student organization. Through the collective, she met faculty advisor Mark Glickman, Senior Lecturer on Statistics, who’d become her senior thesis advisor and mentor.

“I've always been more analytical and math-oriented than reading and writing,” she said. “I like iterating and talking through problems, and I always thought that it would give me more options to do applied math. And then I landed on data science because while I like computer science, I liked to use it to help me solve and contextualize my math problems. Data science allowed me the tools to set up my math problems the way I wanted them to.”

Sands, A.B. '24, puts those math and data science skills to work every day on the strategy and development analytics team at Major League Baseball (MLB). She produces engagement reports on everything from marketing campaigns to social media content, helping discern the most effective ways to not only tap into baseball’s existing fanbase, but also reach out to potential new fans.

“That's the ultimate goal – to make baseball better, to make people feel like they have something that they can love,” she said. “The reason that I pursued this type of job is so I can bring my love of baseball to others. It's been such a huge outlet for me, and honestly in the crazy world that we live in, I think baseball and sports in general is a pretty healthy outlet.”

Sands said her applied math education has shaped how she thinks and approaches problems at work.

“I'm obviously not deriving equations on a day-to-day basis, but I distinctly remember problem solving in different classes and optimizing problems,” she said. “Optimization was one of my favorite classes at SEAS, and that's the exact type of thinking that I use here on a day-to-day basis.”

This isn’t Sands’s first stint with MLB. As a second-year student, she attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which was where she first met members of the MLB analytics team. That meeting led to her interning with the department that summer.

“I thought that being at a league would provide a very good perspective as to how different teams had to do things, and how everything rolls up into one,” she said. “You're doing 10 different projects that are completely unique to each other at a time. You have to manage a bunch of different stakeholders, both internally and externally, as well as vendors.”

After her junior year, Sands interned at the sports betting website FanDuel, but her work there focused more on sports statistics and analytics instead of business analytics. She knew she wanted to return to the business side, either with a team or preferably another league office. Keeping in touch with her MLB colleagues throughout her senior year, Sands applied for her current position in her final semester and started soon after graduation.

“I've definitely been able to understand how different clubs work and the priorities of them, because in addition to the league, we serve all 30 clubs in my role,” she said. “I've also really tried to get to know people around the building and understand what different departments do to remind myself that the business works as a whole, not individual departments.”

While it was always her dream to attend an Ivy League university, Sands wasn’t exactly confident when Ivy Day rolled around. She’d already been rejected from one school when she applied early action, and none of the initial admissions emails she opened that day had good news.

“Harvard was the last one,” she said. “I wondered why I would even think I had a shot. I got in, and I had just finished tutoring at my high school. I was still parked at the school, but I couldn't not open it immediately. I just remember screaming in my parents' car that I was borrowing. I never in a million years thought that this would happen. It was the only Boston area school that I applied to, and many of my friends swore that it was destiny for me to end up there.”