I’ve always been a bit of a numbers person. Math was always my favorite class in school. The homework hardly felt like work. I was always interested in finding patterns in things and seeing what type of information I could extract from the world around me.
This persisted into college. I started off at a community college and had no idea what to major in, so I just continued taking gen eds and calculus classes, because why not? At a certain point, I looked around my Calculus III class and realized that everybody there was either an engineer or a mathematician. No one was there just because they felt like it, like myself. I didn’t even realize you could just major in math. But once I discovered that, I knew what I wanted to do, and it turned out that I was already on the path towards doing it.
I graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a bachelor’s in math and a minor in statistics. After experiencing a lot of very intense coursework, as well as a lot of life changes, I had already made plans to travel abroad. I would end up spending the next 3 years living/travelling around the world. My first home away from home was Athens, Greece, where I worked in political activism. After that, I wanted to broaden my horizons a bit further, so I found a job teaching 3rd grade in Kuwait. Once the summer got too hot, I found myself in Spain trying to learn a 3rd language (the 2nd was Arabic). Eventually, I ran out of money and had no choice but to return home to Chicago. This was shortly before the pandemic hit, so I would end up staying a lot longer than I had anticipated.
Like many others, I had a lot of time to reflect during the pandemic. I had experienced quite a bit of the world and worked in many different fields, but nothing quite stuck. I felt like I was running around in circles only to end up no closer to where I wanted to be. I couldn’t figure out why, so I retraced my steps. I looked back at the last few years and tried to think about what really made me happy. The hostels and beaches were great, but I’m not the type of person to relax for too long. I get bored if I’m too still. So what was it that wasn’t boring to me?
Numbers. And patterns, and data, and math, and computers, and everything in between. I thought back at how much I enjoyed the problem solving challenges I was faced with while in university and how time would pass easily when I was working through a new topic. I remembered taking an optimization class and being blown away by how powerful matrices and multi-dimensional regressions could be. Or my first class in R, where we were able to crunch thousands of lines of code with just a few commands. There was so much potential in the world of crunching numbers and so much more to be understood. So the choice was clear to me. I needed to study data.
