On Doing Data While Studying Data

Despite all the drawbacks of the ongoing COVID pandemic, one of its main highlights has been its effect on my career. I started work at Excelera on February 3rd, 2020; roughly a month before the onset of the virus in the United States. Like virtually every other student and non-essential employee, this pushed almost all of my 9-5 to become entirely virtual.

At first, I loathed the idea of remote work. I had just begun my internship, and hoped to have the prototypical "office experience" of meetings, teamwork, and overall learning. Granted, these feelings against this venture into remote work were additionally exacerbated by the fact that my "home office" consisted of an 8' x 5' sun room on Carroll Avenue in Midway St. Paul that served an additional duty as bike storage, and was directly adjacent to the communal television where some edition of Madden NFL for Xbox bordered on being a constant. I would start work around 7:30 am, work solidly for half an hour, then do double duty between Excelera development and class through about noon (this was the early days of the pandemic, where online classes were little more than a cluster). This allowed me to really dig into Excelera, and carve out a good niche within the organization, making it the ultimate fit for me.

Eventually, the school year ended, and my home office moved to the office of my parent's house where I truly embraced the WFH grind. Waking up around 7 for calls and grinding solidly until 5 or 6 in the evening, hours I may not have worked had Excelera been working in the office. I loved it. The calls early in the morning, and pair programming late into the afternoon. It all was part of the day to day without the added commitment of class.

After summer, September 2020 rolled around, and I moved into an apartment of my own about 5 minutes away from Hamline. I bought a desk from some furniture wholesaler and set up in a 900 square foot, one-bedroom apartment. The set up was exponentially better than the previous two, and my proximity to campus allowed me to better balance work and class. I would simply work around classes, working until about 15 minutes before class, and resuming about 10 minutes after the class' end.

During this time, there were certainly awkward moments along the way. Times where meetings forced me to join from Hamline's student center, or sending off a quick email in the midst of a class were certainly not optimal, but were great lessons in flexibility and working through barriers. Now, three times each week, Excelera gets an hour of my time from a random office or conference room on campus.

At the same time, the learning experiences have also lent interesting experiences of their own. Over the course of my time in data science classes at Hamline, I have always felt at least a step ahead of the curriculum, having learned R before it was taught and teaching myself Python just for kicks. Thus certain classes have been rather backwards in terms of learning. While I think Hamline would like students to take a class on something like SQL, then apply it in something like a project or internship; my experience has been entirely flipped.

Take Tableau (ew) for example, Hamline has a Data Management and Communication class where it is assumed students have negligible experience using Tableau for dynamic dashboarding. I don't want to sound like I'm the leading expert in Tableau, frankly I think it lacks pretty necessary functionality and actively find ways to avoid using it at work (I'd much rather stand up a quick Shiny/Streamlit app), but working at Excelera definitely forced some familiarity with the service and how to use it with a database. Having this pre-experience did allow for some deeper learning-- making higher level viz, integrating R and Python, etc.-- but also took away some of the nuance of the class.

Now that classes at Hamline are back to being "fully in-person", mixing classes and work has become more more of a process, but I wouldn't change it. Sure, there have been awkward times where I've had to leave a conference call in the middle to go to class, or had work disturbed by a friend passing by in the student center, but the experience is frankly invaluable.