Personal Growth…
Article on Professionalism
My last article was a bit long so hopefully this one is more concise. Although this article is an important topic - it’s about personal growth. Everything from this past year where I think I have expanded my current skills or identified a potential preference that brings joy to myself. Below is a short list of some of my key findings:
Long term interest: Detailed Analytics: Recently, I had an opportunity to work on a project where the type of work varied drastically. Sometimes I would be doing analytics, somtimes I would be doing collaborative work, and other times I might monitoring a system looking for failures that needed escalated. What I realized is that I find great comfort doing detailed analytics work. It became obvious that I do not get tired or bored doing this work. I was also very proud of my accomplishments and found it easy to push to get the most value out of each project.Distancing myself from busy-body work: I have always been able to adapt to almost any situation and have learned to tolerate aspects of the situation that I find frustrating, but in 2022 I realized that I have always hated being bombarded with requests. Now, this might sound like a normal expections of a job but I am referring to a role where a new request comes in every few minutes that needs attention - sort of the customer service type role but can also be found in technical roles. I had a role where I would get an email, slack message, and app alert from each source every couple minutes and I needed to immediately respond and on top of that I needed to monitor several dashboards on a very frequent basis. I could do it all but this would be constant for hours and realized that my introverted self just became exhausted with this work. This type of work in limited bursts is fine but not 40% of my work hours for a year.OOP and Simulations: I really enjoyed some of my coding projects this past year. My favorite and often most challenging study was expanding my experience with making object oriented programs which often centered around building simulations. I motivation was a YouTube video about Decision Science - similar to data science but with more emphasis on evaluating what is the value of ideas to the organization. After looking at the open source tools for simulation, I realized that there was an incredible amount of potential to explore dynamic problems that often machine learning can not capture very effectively.SQL Projects: I was finally able to write Advanced SQL off my todo list. I knew fundamental concepts but never had to do a full ETL project. In total I did about three projects that started with messy data and went through all the steps to get it into a cloud or local database. Afterwards, I kept adding new data to it and checking to see if the database function well and was easy to access the information. After a handful of projects, I think the only topic still on my SQL todo list is to do a project where I use recursive CTE. I have learned about them but never really needed to incorporate them into a project.I'm decent with Tableau: I always thought I was not very good with Tableau but it turns out that I have very similar capabilities as those who use Tableau on a regular basis. It was a bit shocking because I have always discounted this skill. I also taught a 1.5 hour class on the subject this year when an instructor was unable to make it to the class. I did pretty good I think for only discussing everything from memory and only 30 minutes advance notice.I'm typically a good listener: This is a trait that I realized that not many people have within the data science field. Too many times this past year, I witnessed people answering questions that were never asked or going on tangents. I think this is why I find mentoring others be very natural.Project Management: It seems as if project management is my de facto role. When in a group I seem to be the one that plans out the steps and wants to do a work breakdown structure. Breaking down projects in small components and managing their execution seems like the obvious first step. What do other people do? My experience is that confusion is the alternative but maybe there are ways - I guess it works for Jazz musicians.
