Randomness, Predictability, and Control

Ian Goodwin (April ’25 Honors graduate in Applied & Computational Mathematics) could hear a pin drop as he sat in the library of BYU’s law building. It was his go-to place -- sometimes for hours or an entire day -- to focus when he needed to write or contemplate complex ideas for his Great Questions Essay. As an applied math student, Goodwin enjoyed this challenge and opportunity to solve problems. He was enveloped in a question that he had been thinking about for a long time: how much control do we have over our lives?

The Great Questions Essay ended up being Goodwin’s most impactful experience in the Honors Program. “There’s never really been a time in my life where I was told, pick some sort of deep question that you really want to know about, but then I had all of the motivation of a school class towards actually putting a lot of thought into answering it,” he explained. Delving into topics such as neuroscience, law and philosophy, Goodwin concluded that whether or not we have control over our lives, it is best to believe that we do. “There’s always something you can do, or at least you should always believe that there is something you can do,” he said.

Always curious about our capacity to control situations even in a serendipitous world, Goodwin’s favorite unexpected connections class was all about randomness. “I tended before to think of randomness like unpredictability, uncontrollability, like undesirable,” he said. “But things that you don’t expect can also be beautiful and better than you were planning.” Now that he has graduated, this concept has helped him not feel as stressed as he makes decisions about the next chapter in his life. He feels confident that even if things don’t go as he plans, that doesn’t mean things won’t go well.

The skills Goodwin learned about problem solving through different disciplines in the unexpected connections classes translated well into his LDE project. The project was focused on helping Brazza International Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose aim is to provide educational, health and developmental support in underserved communities. Goodwin and his team consulted them on outreach, networking and fundraising techniques. As the team pivoted on different ideas, he learned a lot about how to work well with other people from various backgrounds. “One of the big sources of randomness in life is just other people,” he said. It was an experience that he wouldn’t have had in any of his other courses. “It really stretched a lot of muscles that I hadn’t been using,” he explained.

As his culminating Honors experience, Goodwin’s thesis, “Machine Learning for Time Series Prediction in Psychotherapy” focused on how well machine learning models could predict patients’ distress scores at BYU’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS). He found that machine learning models could predict larger batches of distress scores faster and more accurately than therapists could. Goodwin said that these predictions could potentially be very helpful in making decisions about how to assign resources in CAPS. “It’s kind of just a question of which people’s lives are we going to be able to do the most good,” he said.

The Honors Program gave Goodwin many opportunities to learn about randomness, predictability, and the control we possess in our lives. He is now doing a summer internship for Intermountain Health’s machine learning team, then heading to MIT this fall to pursue a master’s in operations research. As he is looking forward to this next chapter in his life, things may not go as he planned or predicted, but he is optimistic about his ability to take control in his life. “Just because I don’t know how something’s going to turn out,” Goodwin explained, “doesn’t mean it’s going to turn out badly.”