Inspired by Renee’s blog post about becoming a data scientist, I wanted to write down my own goals. In my mind, these goals are like sand that does not settle. They stir around, meddle and cloud my thoughts. I’m hoping that creating this list, making it public, will let some of that sand settle and let me focus on the everyday work to reach these goals.
####Short term (2015):
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Get accepted into and complete Chicago's [Data Science for Social Good Fellowship](http://dssg.io/)- Didn’t get in - turns out this year the program chose to accept individuals with a lot of computer science experience and little public policy experience - instead of individuals from public policy who are computer science beginners
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Get accepted into and begin a graduate degree at either the University of Chicago or Barcelona GSE- Done! Got in to UChicago!
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Compete in an online data science or ML competition- Done! Participated in Driven Data’s Pump it Up competition
- Fork and contribute to a GitHub open-source project
- Get better at creating visualizations with R packages
- Learn d3 and other visualization tools
- Use Python more frequently for data munging
####Longer term (2016-2017):
- Complete graduate degree
- Find employment with a team who uses data science in the public sector
- Pursue another certification or even get into a PhD program
####Longer-longer term (2017-):
- Start my own team of analytical consultants or my own product
This is a working list. I will add more goals as I think of them.