Education has taken me around the world.

How Everything Began

China → Singapore

In 2013, it was the first time I went abroad, away from my family, to pursue my education in Singapore. The warm and beautiful insular country is situated in Southeast Asia, only a four-hour flight away from my hometown in Guangdong, China. Though much smaller than China, Singapore is an enormous cultural melting pot where inspirations mushroom. It was also the first time I experienced the world outside of my own through education and travel.

The more I learn about the world, the more I understand how little knowledge I possess. It refers to the Dunning-Kruger effect that describes a cognitive bias that people are overconfident despite their incompetency in a certain domain due to a lack of awareness of how little they know. As a child who skydived from the Peak of "Mount Stupid" to the Valley of Despair, I quickly learned that I should always study the bigger picture of the topic through facts and statistics to give any educated opinions.

Statistical Correlation of Love and the Number of Phone Calls

Fortunately, I'm no stranger to facts and statistics. I have always been fascinated by numbers since I was a little kid. I could not get enough satisfaction from solving mathematical problems to get the exact numbers. The preciseness and accuracy of numbers seemed to be the single truth I could rely upon.

Of course, I learned that not everything could be measured by numbers as I grow older, like how much my parents love my sisters and me even though love is an unspoken language in our household. It is sometimes positively correlated with the number of calls we have in a week because we miss one another, yet sometimes negatively correlated with the number of phone calls because we do not want to disturb one another's busy schedules. My parents would probably be furious if they heard me measuring how much we love one another by the number of phone calls we have.

Jokes aside, I love how numbers decompose the complexity of a problem into insights and simple solutions. When I first read "Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century" from Harvard Business Review, I was amazed by the things that Data Scientists could do with data.

From predicting a passenger's survival rate in Titanic to speech recognition, it sounded like magic half a century ago but is the reality now. That's when the stars lined up for me; I found a way to do what I love!

My Journey As An Aspiring Data Scientist

China → Singapore → United States

The next chapter of my life unfolded as I traveled across the world to the United States in 2017. My pursuit in Computational and Data Science bachelor's degree at George Mason University took me on a voyage around the data science world.

Before I learned about data science, I did not know that are so many more analytical techniques that could generate insights from data. I gained experience in data visualization, statistical modeling, machine learning, and database management. All these seemed like a lot, right? I again found myself on the bottom of the Valley of Despair as I explored the depth of the data science world further by participating in hackathons and learning about inspiring innovations.

One of the most jarring truths I came across was that numbers in data science could be ambiguous and not always precise and accurate. I wasn't fond of ambiguity until I realized how to explore more possibilities with a healthy amount of uncertainty using confidence intervals.

I feel excited and scared about the ambiguity and possibilities in my life, but I am sure that one day I will overcome the Slope of Enlightenment and reach the Plateau of Sustainability. I aspire to become a Data Scientist who contributes to the well-being of the world.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my journey as an aspiring Data Scientist! Please feel free to explore my work samples and contact me with any questions.