Samantha Hunter 11/29/2021

My opinion hasn’t changed about what I think a data scientist is and what they do from mid-August. I still think data scientists are just statisticians who like and are hopefully good at communicating with people. I still think that. Learning a programming language is just acquiring another tool to turn numbers into something meaningful. I think the biggest perception change for me is that data science can be more collaborative than I imagined. I knew R was open source so I feel like I have a good idea of how to problem solve collaboratively, but I was really impressed with Github’s version control to work on a group project long-distance. The entire time I was worried I was going to overwrite something important my partner did, but it never happened.

I’m really excited to continue working on the foundations we built in this class. Hands down, I am most excited to explore APIs on my own. I definitely got a bit lost in the sauce with the APIs as I was looking for a data set for the final project and ended up just choosing a static data set that I found interesting. Some other personal projects I think I’d like to tackle is that I read quite a few in-depth investigative journalism pieces and I would really like explore or mimic some of the work that has already done to improve my skills. I think it would be really interesting to try to turn something like long article into a Shiny app. I would also probably poke around to see if I could figure out what kind of analysis these journalists run. I recently found out (as I wrote this) that Propublica has a Github, so I absolutely want to see how they go about running the incredible analysis that they do. The last thing I want to try in R to create is a cheatsheet in RMarkdown in the style of a Tidyverse or Shiny cheatsheet for the SAS language since that is what I use where I work. Clearly I really like working in R and I really feel like my world as a data scientist has just really opened up from taking this course.

R is just neat

Finally, while I definitely think I will use Github to house all of these hopeful-projects, I doubt I’ll keep up with Githubs blog. It may be nice to have some sort of blog for myself where I reflect on projects, I don’t really like the Github interface for the blog.