As you've probably seen by the 15 or so times I mention it on this website, I'm an undergrad at Hamline (a small liberal arts school in Minnesota, for those outside of Minnesota) and study all things data. I love R, which if you are a certain professor at Hamline and are reading this: give it a try, before you hate... you know who you are.
At the time I'm writing this, I'm an intern at Excelera, a specialty pharma consultant in Minneapolis (although right now, my office is located in my parents' house, thanks COVID). The company lets me sort of have free reign over managing the data stories I put out and the extent to which we put models into production. Not only is it some great learning, but I also feel as though the work I produce has a meaningful impact on not only Excelera, but on the patients of the health systems contracted to the company, and the manufacturers producing the drugs. I've produced large-scale data viz for use both internal and in production, and written machine learning models used at some of the country's leading health systems.
Most of the work I do in data science is run in R, although occasionally the job calls for Python. Personally, I love that R is so simple, and written explicitly for data. Although part of my attachment to R is that my knowledge of it was really born out of the necessity to wrangle a "too-big-for-excel" dataset for BAC @ MC 2019. The data revolved around transforming the energy grid in New York to a 50% renewable mix of power. The provided data was in the neighborhood of 2 million rows, the largest data I had ever seen at the time. I was so green to the prospect of analysis, let alone data science, that good old Excel my "tool for the job". As you can imagine, Excel was not the answer. I remember walking up to my then-macroeconomics professor with a crashing, RAM-overloaded, Excel struggling laptop and asking "how can I open this file". Eric, the professor and a huge mentor for me, literally laughed at me, told me to come to his office, and we would get a "real" tool. We downloaded R/RStudio, and he basically told me to go to town with it. I had never really written code before, so literally every line written was ganked from a poorly queried Stack Overflow search.
Eric telling me to "figure it out" was probably the best educational experience I've ever had. Knowing you're completely helpless unless you ask the right questions taught me not only how to better my R skills, but also how to really solve a problem, and to learn from previous mistakes. The first code I wrote for BAC @ MC was absolutely disgusting (like actually soooooo bad). But I as I worked on other projects, research, and competitions, I slowly started to become more and more comfortable and capable of writing decent code and producing meaningful analysis. I went from base R functions, to effectively using the tidyverse/tidymodels, to applying effective ML.
That spring/summer, I applied for more than 50 internships, thinking I was ready. I literally did not hear back from a single one. I was disheartened, but as I grew my skills, I started producing more and more. I was able to demonstrate what I could do, and it did not go unnoticed. I went to MinneFair, a job fair for data science, and met with some of the large players around MN. They were friendly, but had the clout and ability to hire someone with far more experience than me. Then I met with Excelera, who I felt was an insanely interesting company. They invited me to meet with the CEO later that day, and again a few weeks following. This whole time, I was anxious and excited to work there. I had been an intern at Northwestern Mutual, working in financial planning, but wanted to work in data science. Eventually Excelera offered me the position, and the rest is history.
I really started this website and blog to act as a representation of who I am in the digital space. You can check out my CV/resume on here, or read posts on here which I plan to focus on code I've written, projects I've worked on, or data driven thoughts that pass through my mind.
All the best!
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