About me (Now archived)
I am a newly minted data scientist as well as an ecologist, and this is where I show off all my cool projects!
I am a recent graduate from General Assembly’s Data Science Intensive course, which was a 12 week long, full time course that covered a variety of topics including data cleaning, exploratory data analysis, supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, neural net (Tensorflow), SQL, and natural language processing. If you’d like to read more about my experience, what I learned and my thoughts on the course, see my blog post!
Why data science?
I started this course because throughout my science degree, I became more and more aware of how much of the world and our knowledge of the world is dependent on data, and subsequently became more and more uncomfortable with how little I actually knew (in the grander scale of things) about working with data, despite regularly doing data analysis as a part of the science I was doing. At the same time, I had outgrown the capabilities of Excel and had started searching for more powerful alternatives, so I signed up to codecademy and taught myself to code in R, and some very basic python.
This actually paid off for me very soon after when I went on an intensive field unit where we worked closely in teams to design experiments, and were required to not only conduct the experiment during the day but also produce analyses and visualisations by the end of each day to present to the rest of the cohort and professors. Under this extreme pressure to deliver, and to analyse data on the fly using R, my prior knowledge was definitely an advantage. I would definitely say that that trip was one of the most memorable times in my degree. It left me with a few gems of knowledge:
- Good teamwork and team culture is crucial in a project’s success (our team worked amazing together, others were not so lucky)
- Being comfortable with coding and working with data is not only essential, but also rather fun (when it goes well!)
- Solving problems is absolutely addictive.
When COVID-19 left me in isolation at home, I decided it was a great time to really push myself to learn more. It really was quite a push too, as I was already partway into my Honours degree at UNSW when I decided to pick up a full time course for 3 months. Many, many late nights later I’m very pleased to say that I’ve done it, and on to the next pursuit!
What else do you do?
Outside of my data science and ecology pursuits, I read books, train (gym or muay thai) and spend time with my dogs. I have two amazing, fluffy good boys, Bart and Blue, and one of my favourite things to do is to take them to the beach for a long swim and splash in the water.
