What initially made you interested in Data Science?

I became interested in Data Science because it allowed me to put more technical skills like math, statistics, and coding to use in almost any industry. I think data science is becoming increasingly important and will be used almost everywhere to solve problems.

What is next for you after you complete the program?

I will be working as a Data Scientist for Rhombus Power, a defense consulting company.

What are the most important skills you learned or experiences you had during the program?

I think learning all of the theory behind the algorithms we used throughout our classes in DATA 1010 as well as in Deep Learning was really helpful because having an understanding of what we are implementing makes it a lot easier to explain these models to non-technical team members. Additionally, having projects in almost all of our classes was really useful for going through the full data science pipeline and trying to solve several different types of data problems.

What was your practicum project and what did you learn from it?

My practicum was predicting voter turnout using previous voter history for a congressional primary campaign for a newly redrawn district in Pennsylvania. It involved running through the whole data science pipeline, starting with cleaning up the raw voter exports, to determining voters' new districts, to creating models and putting results and recommendations together for the campaign. I was really able to learn the importance of data cleaning in the data science pipeline as well as how to make results easily interpretable for those not familiar with data science and machine learning.