My Data Science Origin Story¶
That's not a thing¶
I studied philosophy and literature in undergrad. My favorite class was symbolic logic. I liked it so much I’d do every exercise in the text book and made up more problems on my own to solve. I took every undergrad and grad logic class my university offered. I remember wondering if I can … do logic for a living some day. I found out that isn’t a thing. (No surprise there!) Nobody makes a living turning natural language propositions into formal mathematical logic. Instead I was told “if you like formal logic you might have an aptitude for computer science”. I took a couple courses (no undergrad degree) - which turned out to be true.
Assistant professor = people (think they) know what you do¶
That lead to studying linguistics … then computation linguistics … then machine learning and becoming an academic.
Wait ... that's a thing?¶
Around 2012 I met the data science team at Kobo Books. They were the first data scientists I had met … and in fact the first time I heard about data science. I didn’t realize this professional field existed. You mean this is …. a thing!?! You can work with data wrangling and probability and machine learning all day?! … and you actually get paid?! …. scratch that - you actually get very very well paid?! Where do I sign up? I did a career switch shortly after and have been a working data scientist ever since.
Data scientist = no one knows what you do¶
This was the same year that Harvard Business Review declared “Data Scientist“ to be the sexiest career of the 21st century. Not sure about the job being “sexy” in any sense, but I do find the work fulfililng. I like how Geekosystem made a crack about that the “sexiest career” thing with tongue firmly planted in cheek:
Because if there’s one thing that gives a job an indefinable allure, it is everybody else being kind of unsure what it is you really do — a quality that data scientists damn near embody.