Hello all, and welcome to my adventures and mishaps as I dive in the world of data science. To start with, I am Scott Locke, a recent graduate from the University of California, Irvine with a PhD in Physics having returned to Seattle after originally growing up in Washington. A bit about me outside of work is I love both playing and watching sports, am getting better at barbecuing/smoking, and am known to tell a bad joke or two. I hope you will stick around as I evolve as a data scientist, and hopefully as my blog evolves with me.
More background on me is I have done a little bit of everything for work. My first “paycheck” was for refereeing soccer games before I was a teen. I spent a month bucking hay in high school, worked 35-hour weeks at a grocery store while I earned my BS in Physics in 2 years, and worked graveyard as security for a hotel while simultaneously volunteering in a pathology lab. Most recently I spent the last six years earning my PhD.
For my graduate research I studied neutrinos as a part of two experiments, Super-Kamiokande and CAPTAIN, doing a little bit of everything for both, traveling this place and that. My primary research was with the Super-Kamiokande (SK) collaboration, where I worked on developing methods to reduce background events obscuring the ability to see solar neutrinos. Some of the ways I did this were complex, some involving being the guinea pig for an event trigger system (what decides to save events during data taking) that had never been used for analysis before, some were simple but required thinking outside the box, and some were taking work that came before and adding my own touch to take it to new reaches. All in all, I took what had been studied multiple times before and cutting the loss of data in half caused by accidentally removing signal when cutting out the background noise. For the most recent phase of the experiment, this equates to recovering a year of data. Maybe I will get the chance to dive into this another time.
I am proud of what I accomplished, and if things lined up well, I would not have minded staying in Physics. I will always love physics, but also would like to face new challenges. Although there are a lot of questions being asked in physics, most have been around for a while (relatively). SK first turned on over 25 years ago, and although some of the questions asked at the beginning of the experiment have been answered, many are still being studied today.
While I still find those unanswered questions interesting, I looked to switching to data science to drive myself to new challenges and into unfamiliar territory. I have a love and knack for numbers, and although I am not afraid to get my hands dirty, I find the most fulfillment from being able to tackle tough mental challenges. Whether it comes from finally grasping the small nuances of problem, or the satisfaction once a major hurdle has been cleared. I know the field of data science can provide stimulating and rewarding tasks, albeit I know it will not be an easy path. I am also a firm believer that you do not know yourself until you have been pushed far enough, until you really must buckle down and break through whatever wall is in from of you.
This will probably be the only inspirational quote in these blog posts (we will see how many jokes I can eventually get in there), but I started a data science immersive program with General Assembly to help me with the transition to the field and they just so happened to ask for my favorite inspirational quote in one of their onboarding surveys. When I look at this journey I am about to embark on, I think it is fitting to put here as well. I first read this when I was training for a marathon, and I was coming from probably the most difficult time of my life. I think of this quote when I am struggling, doing something new, or faced with difficulties.
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1899
I have known success and I have known failure; I know I will face many more of both, and it is in these that I will develop the most as a person and data scientist.
Scott Locke 