The Person - Erin Wills

Erin Wills

Erin Wills has a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University, a Master’s degree in Education Theory from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and a certificate in Data Science from Northwestern University.

Background

With over 10 years of experience, I have gained a broad range of both technical and collaboration skills. When looking back at my career, I realize now that I had strong technical skills and decent communication skills at the beginning of my career that made me ideal for working on short-term projects that spanned across multiple business and technical groups. This was great for developing my collaboration skills and understanding how to deal with project conflicts. The downside is that I rarely worked in a single area for very long. Due to the pandemic, I saw the amount of time spent on technical projects go down and more time spent working on administrative roles which I foresaw as a brick wall to my career goals. For this reason, I started working a second job as a data and visualization instructional specialist with EdX. My ultimate goal is to work in the data field so that I can continue developing technical skills.

Through the combination of all my experiences, I think I am commonly thought as a versatile and entrusted project engineer that is often tasked to solve sensitive problems that require tact, technical knowledge, executing past uncertainty, and developing consensus among technical and non-technical peers.

Professional Ambitions

I have always considered myself a problem solver and that is probably what I would like to do in my role at a company. I enjoyed working in the chemical industry improving and developing processes but that role had many disadvantages related to where I could live and the transferability of skills to other fields. I forsee myself working as a data scientist, software engineer, or systems integrator. I’m looking at the data scientist role now because it seems like the best option for starting out at a company.

Interests

I don’t really find most of the technology used in data science difficult to learn or understand. I had previously been exposed to large amounts of messy data and have an appreciation for the new tools that automate and reduce the amount of time to find meaningful relationships but at the same time I still enjoy coming up with an idea and testing it to see if there is some truth to it.

I am developing my skills using a variety of marchine learning algorithms and technology. Information about that can be found on my curriculum and projects pages. I am particularly interested in doing simulations since that was a significant part of my early career as an engineer.

With my free time, I have been trying to get in better physical shape. I injured my foot during the pandemic and could not have it fully treated until 2022. I am now back to taking long walks along the Lake Michigan and through the city. I also love cooking and going out to restaurants, attending festivals, and swimming. I’m not a big fan of being out in the sun in the middle of the day so I like to watch a movie, read, code, or play an indoor game and I am outside often between 5:30am to 8am and from 6pm and later.

Getting to Know Me… My Posts

Here are some basic posts about me. I will eventually add another section that will just be about my technical coding writings or maybe I will make a Medium account. Stay tune for updates…

This site is a modified version of Hydejack v9.1.4 created by Erin Wills.