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.
