Reflecting on September’s Goals

In September, as a new freshman at Ohio State, I planned a timeline of how I wanted to start research and gain analytics experience, a to-do list of important steps to accomplish in the process, and a prioritized list of the data analytics skills I wanted to gain.

The timeline I created went something like this:

In September, I planned to network and focus on connecting with professionals and businesses at career fair events. I attended 5 days of career fairs, two networking events, and one internship interview in September. I learned how to follow up with new connections following the BDAA sponsor night in December. In September-October, I planned to complete a basic HTML website in preparation for Hack OHI/O. I created my website, eabert.github.io, at Kent Hack Enough, and expanded upon it significantly in May. In October I planned to formulate a question and start a project analyzing Twitter data to answer it. I learned how to scrape Twitter data at the BDAA social media data mining workshop in March. In October I also planned to Google and reach out to a professor for research. I did lots of career-oriented Googling in this time, and reached out to Dr. Kate Calder in early December about the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI), a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) hosted at Ohio State. In November I planned to start research, and get academic credit for it second semester. I am now doing research with Dr. Calder, and will be attending the MBI kick off next week.

I titled my accompanying to-do list “Prioritized experience building plan”. I first aimed to analyze data independently in a side project. Working with teams I analyzed big data at two hackathons and participated in a case competition, and I am now finally visualizing data sets as a side project on my own. I aimed to then launch an HTML coded portfolio website. I did this via github in October. Next, I aimed to participate in Hack OHI/O and other hackathons. I participated in Kent Hack Enough in October, Hack OHI/O in November, and DataFest in April. I made a note to read abstracts from the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum. I did, and in March I volunteered at the Denman. And finally, I aimed to start assisting a professor with their data analytics based research. I reached out to my now-research adviser in early December and we are currently analyzing data on a biostatistics research project.

I based my prioritized list of skills I want off of job requirements for data scientists at Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. The skills were as follows: SQL certified, Python, R, JavaScript, Hadoop, Java, C++, data mining, machine learning, data structures, and Excel. In September, I knew Java and Excel. At the end of my freshman year, I now know Python, R, JavaScript, Java, C++, data mining, machine learning, Excel, and am SQL certified. Although I do know these various languages and concepts to different degrees, I am not done learning, even in R, in which I have become most proficient.

Part of the reason that I am in the midst of doing grant-funded research as a freshman is because I set goals and a plan for myself last autumn. Even if I planned to move unattainably fast back then, the goals and dreams that I listed prompted me to take action and led me to where I am now. Through setting ambitious goals and striving to learn and gain experience in data analytics, I pushed myself to take action and did everything that I could.

My goal in September was to do research in data mining, preferably in regards to people’s health and habits. Now, with everything I’ve learned and experienced this year, my goal is to do research in quantitative user experience, specifically in the area of web analytics. My long term goal is to get an internship and full time job in this field at Google in the next three summers.

I will never stop dreaming and learning everything I can about my goals.