I grew up in small town Kansas but have always been a city mouse.
A few years ago I discovered a passion for finding insights like needles in a haystack of data. Often it just takes an inquisitive mind, a few good questions, and in those rare moments being brave enough to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit to buck ‘conventional’ wisdom and explore ‘things that will never work.’ Investing a few of my evenings on these adventures were always great learning opportunities and sometimes they were even successful! As my career progressed, fewer of my contributions came from asking data to reveal its secrets… I missed these adventures enough to know it was time for a change.
Having a passion for data and being good at data science are two different things. I knew there was a lot to learn, so I decided to take an “adult gap year” (well, almost two years) to pursue a data science master’s degree at Northwestern University.
This has been the most amazing and challenging experience of my life. I get to learn new ways to transform data into information almost every day and I feel incredibly blessed that my family found a way to make everything work (and put up with me as a grad student). I’m looking forward to joining a new team to share the skills I’ve gained at Northwestern and am excited to learn from them how they bring data to life in their organization.