Author Archives: RC

RC May 2 journal

For my last personal journal entry, I’d like to give a huge shout-out to Maria Baker, our project manager!

Maria has been driving our project since day 1. She has been working so hard to make the OB&UP vision materialize. While Teddy, Nuraly, and I are working on the individual contributor work on our own schedule, Maria coordinated all our work to make sure we meet our milestones, kept our work organized, scoped our weekly deliverables, wrote all our content + updates, and prepped for the presentation. She also did all of it while also diving into much of the technical work herself (data cleaning & analysis). She has also been connecting with all of us (setting additional Zoom meetings outside of class), and with Bret (around our crazy schedules).

It’s been a really fun project for me, where I also get to learn WordPress. So again, I want to thank Maria for pitching her project, having us on her team, and making this a fun and rewarding project!

 

 

RC Personal bios and contribution statements

I am currently a Digital Humanities graduate student at The City University of New York (CUNY). I graduated from UT Austin with a BBA degree. My professional career started in consulting, followed by corporate finance before I pivoted into data science. I also teach occasionally and work with an NGO that focuses on Black healthcare bias. My research interest lies in environmental and climate Justice, as well as gender studies. My primary project responsibility is Web Development. My secondary project responsibilities as a collaborator include project management, text analysis, and content creation. 

 

RC Personal Blog – Project Assignment

I was excited (and relieved) coming out of the last class with the project assignment. I’d admit I was a bit nervous with how the project assignment was going to unfold, as there were so many unknowns (e.g., gap in skillset/ interest, feasibility of the projects, what if everybody voted for the same project or not enough people are signing up for each project). 
 
I found the skillset blog post extremely helpful to get a bird eye’s view of everyone’s skillset as well as interest. The project pitches were also great and helpful to think through the scope of each project. The project assignment exercise was also a useful mental exercise for me to think through which type of digital humanities projects I’m more drawn to, as well as techniques I want to develop. While I still don’t have a concrete idea about what my capstone project might be, it is helpful, nevertheless. 
 
I found the first and second round voting helpful as it first cut down the project list. It was just a lot of moving variables that introduced a lot of unknown in the beginning (many projects, many skillsets, many potential combinations of groups), cutting out some projects from first round voting and getting initial read on group was helpful on cutting down with the overwhelming information overload. I ended up being part of the project I was most interested in, which is wonderful. I had a make-or-break question around data acquisition that was addressed at the Q&A session.

Our group have already had a skeleton project scope, which I am looking forward to diving into tonight! Overall, I am looking forward to working on the project and seeing what will come out of it at the end of the semester!

RC Skillsets

FYI, I’d prefer to stay anonymous here since the class blog is public, so I will go by “RC” here. Please however feel free to call me by my first name in person/ class. Hope this is not too confusing!

Project Management/ Documentation: Project management is part of my full-time job as a data science team lead (both research projects and data product development projects). I have also conducted agile/ scrum training with many data teams before. I am familiar with many tools (Kanban, Trello, JIRA, CODA, etc.). I am also familiar with and very effective in driving many product management concepts, such as prioritization framework (e.g. LOE vs. Impact, RICE, etc.), sprint planning, breaking product vision into milestones, estimating effort, timeboxing tasks, creating definitions of done (DoD), gathering requirements, setting OKR and KPI, managing “stakeholder” and team, etc. I am also comfortable with documentation and enjoy it because I actually have some OCD

Data: I do various data analysis/ data visualization/ data science (DS)/ data engineering (DE) work as my full-time job as a data scientist in the Tech sector. My primary languages are python and SQL. I have worked with RedShift, Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Microsoft SQL, and Progres data warehouses. I do want to mention my work is usually more focused on research, inference, and insights, so I don’t have certain software engineering skillsets that are adjacent to DS/DE (e.g., creating a front-end Machine Learning Recommendation system in production). I also want to note that I have been working in big tech firms that have many wonderful internal tools, coding templates, environments, and support teams (e.g., data engineer, etc.), so while I do build data pipelines (ETL), they are built from a data warehouse that is already set up with super helpful templates that I can just update the SQL/ Crontab and other configuration. I have some distance exposure to “building things from scratch” from my peers and other freelance data jobs but don’t have hands-on experience with them.  

Research: As part of my data science job, I conduct many research projects with teams of data scientists, user researchers, and behavioral scientists. I have scoped and executed many research projects (quantitative, qualitative, lit-review, survey, mixed method, usability testing, etc.).  

Graphic Design: From my visual art background, I am proficient with most graphic design tools such as Photoshop, Lightroom, InDesign, and illustrator. Although I am not a professional graphic designer, I have done many personal projects and a handful of freelance work.  

Web Design: I have built a handful of websites with Squarespace before and understand basic HTML and CSS (but haven’t used them in a long time, since Xanga!). Related to user research and graphic design experience I have; I have worked alongside many UX/ UR/ Designers, so I can also offer best practices I have picked up on the way. I haven’t built a website from scratch in WordPress before but am definitely curious to learn.