“If you want to experience significant progress toward your goal, you need to be intentional about the work you’re doing every day.”
Anonymous
I keep a daily 5-year spiral journal, where each day I am able to see my entries on that same day for the past few years.
After a frustrating afternoon a few weeks ago trying to do some time series analysis, I opened up that journal. I was at a low point emotionally. My SARIMA models were basically shrugging their shoulders at the natural price data I was feeding in, predicting very unhelpful prices of anywhere from $1.00 to $14.00. I was hopeful that deep learning algorithms would hold the clue to unlocking the patterns within the numbers, but they seemed to be failing too.
And I internalized that feeling, getting down on myself thinking that I didn’t know what I was doing.
And then I opened the journal and read what I had written a year prior –
“I finally understand how to use .apply() and lambda functions!”
And I had to laugh. First, at the me of a year ago who was SO excited over what now seems like breathing. And then I laughed again at my present self with the negative self-talk. After all, I wasn’t struggling on that present day because I didn’t know what I was doing; I was struggling because I wanted patterns in the data that simply were not present.
Several weeks ago, my instructor told me to start calling myself an “unemployed data scientist.” I started practicing those words, but it still felt fake.
Two night ago, I went to a gathering where I met some new people. Without thinking, I introduced myself as a data scientist and started talking excitedly about some of the projects I’ve been doing. It now feels real.
I AM a data scientist.
I get excited when I first start to explore a new dataset and I start to clean the data almost automatically.
I feel a deep satisfaction when I create a particularly effective data visualization.
I question records or features that seem erroneous and carefully consider their impact on summary statistics.
I dream about code and do SQL queries to relax.
I get frustrated with YouTube videos and Medium articles when I can tell the creator doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
I don’t trust the predictions of a machine learning model until I’ve checked its evaluation metrics and reduced any overfitting.
I’ve found that Python, Pandas SKLearn and SQL syntax has started to enter my non-technical writing (IS NOT NULL even made it onto a grocery list).
I personify my models and empathize when they’re struggling with difficult data.
With every presentation, every project, every conversation and every challenge, I’m feeling more and more at home with the title.
I AM a data scientist.
Lesson of the Day
It’s so important to have a goal and a plan, but also a flexible approach when the initial plan doesn’t work.
Frustration of the Day
In my capstone project, I was hoping to use regression, but had to switch to classification (see above) because of the data.
Win of the Day
The information that I’m getting from my capstone project (data about my other blog and YouTube channel) is already helping me make better decisions about content.
Current Standing on the Imposter Syndrome Scale
2/5
I’m starting to see in myself what others see in me. This will probably change next week once I start to build a dashboard (CSS terrifies me!).
From Teaching to Tech 