I started out on this journey of pursuing my college education and, ultimately, my career knowing that I want to sit in front of a computer for the rest of my life. I think computers appealed to me because my dad worked on them, but also, there is always something new to learn and something different that I could try.
I attended community college at an early age and really enjoyed the atmosphere and having teachers who were experts in their field to teach me. I had decided pretty early on that I wanted to end up at OSU to finish out my degree. After switching majors two times and two community college later, I am now in the senior year of my long college career.
It is interesting to see how you, as a person, change and how the things that are important to you change as well. I knew that computers where I want to end up, but I don’t think I would have guessed that I wanted to study data Science. I have loved my CS classes because they keep on making me learn and grow, and I get to learn new things. But the classes that I feel that really brought me to want to study Data Science have been my Economics 101 class, my statistics classes, and my discrete mathematics classes. These really opened my eyes to data as a fun and interesting field and particularly the application of data.
In the past 4 or 5 years, we have really seen how having correct and unbiased data is really important and that I something that I have always appreciated is the facts without the bias that can be found everywhere we look. I see my love for computers and their raw computing power and the prevalence of data collection to be an interesting cross over. The draw of providing something that is so desperately needed in the world today and gets paid for it is a pretty easy road to go.
The hardest thing to date about this path has been the difficulty of getting experience in my actual field. Due in part to the way classes are scheduled at OSU but not being able to take any of my data science or even Ai classes has made it particularly challenging to understand my field better. The biggest way that COVID affected my plans has been the canceling of my internship over this past spring and summer because I was going to get my first real experience in my field. The Fortunate thing is that I could work on a project for a friend of mine that included some data processing, parsing, sorting, and mapping. All of which were very helpful and enjoyable but still lacking the experience in my actual field.
Looking at the available projects, the ones that most interest me are the ones that involve some data processing, analysis with real-world applications. The DUNE project is the topic project on my list, being that it includes all those things mentioned above and international collaboration, while also working with something that I don’t know very much about. I grew up in a rural area and had farmers all around me, which immediately makes me interested in ALL the Farms because it incorporates data and that real-world application and it is in an area I already have some knowledge about.
All this to say, I like the path I am on, but I don’t know exactly where it will lead. I hope to get one of the projects that will let me do something in my field or at least adjacent. Wherever I land, I will take it as it is and enjoy it. Data is fun, especially when it makes sense.
“Data is good, only if it is good data.” Professor Javier Rojo MY Statistics Professor at OSU