Atha Data Science: The Invitation
April 9th, 2020
And so the endlessly extended invitation is accepted.
Welcome to the beginning of my journey to become a Data Scientist!
To contextualize this journey and its motivations, I want to introduce myself. My name is Anterra, my background is in Physics, and my path forward is rapidly becoming clear to me. I graduated 2017 with a BS in Physics, a concentration in Computational Physics, and minors in Astrophysics, Mathematics, and French from the University of Denver. I have maintained my whole life a deep curiosity for the questions of existence, which led me down that particular academic path into physics, problem solving, and the fundamental nature of things. Following graduation, I accepted first an internship and then an aerospace engineer and research scientist position with Pioneer Astronautics. In that capacity I contributed significantly to various NASA SBIR projects to design and develop novel in-situ resource utilization technology.
After about a year, I made the intentional choice to step back from my engineering position. I acknowledged within myself a need for change. While I found the work in aerospace highly fulfilling and exciting, there were other parts of my personal psychology and emotional needs that had been long neglected. I chose to move to Portland, Oregon, and spend some time devoting to self growth.
I am eternally grateful that I took this time. It is so easy in science and tech, in the American culture of productivity, to be so goal- and future-oriented that we fail to be present and attentive to our more wholistic needs as individuals. My entire life I had spent hurtling down the path of academic achievement, and reaching the supposed end of that path to be met with a sense of emptiness, I knew I needed to look internally.
During my hiatus in Portland, I devoted to yoga, meditation, and music. This return to arts and healing was exponentially rewarding. I had the opportunity to play violin and sing on many stages with other talented musicians, write music, learn the guitar, and begin work on recording my first EP. I adopted a diligent daily practice of yoga, meditation, and journaling, in which I would monitor my own field of thoughts and emotional responses and work to lessen their control on my actions. In turn, I came to understand and be firmly grounded in my value just in being, and not as lying in my various achievements; a much needed change for my mental health. This path led me to discover the Patanjali Yoga Sutra, a thousands-of-years-old Sanskrit text outlining how to navigate the field of the mind and come to know to the true nature of the Self. The discovery of this outline felt like coming home, and coming full circle. Toward the end of my undergraduate studies, I became increasingly interested in how quantum physics could contribute to the philosophy of consciousness, and specifically how its metaphysical implications began to converge with ancient Eastern ideas on existence. Both personally and intellectually, I knew that journeying deep into meditation was the meaningful and perfect next step on the path of my life. I followed the path further, and obtained my 300 hour Yoga Teacher Training certification after completing an immersive 8-month program of further commitment to these practices and to the Self.
It was during this break that I was able to formulate a better idea of how I wanted my future to look. I needed the opportunity to get more in touch with my own self and nature to know what aspects of a life I needed to cultivate to find fulfillment; I needed the quiet to better hear what it was I actually wanted to do. And that brings us to Data Science!
In my time away from science and mathematics I came to know that I thrive in abstract problem solving and realized how much I missed that type of thinking and intellectual challenge. So, I identified that I wanted to take my background in and love for math and problem solving and find a practical real-world application and career with it. The question then became, what form would that take? The engineering role I had held involved a great deal of mechanical engineering and building and testing physical apparatuses, and being in a laboratory handling various chemicals and simulants, which I had little experience in and came to realize I didn’t thrive in or want to do again. The aspects of the role I adored were doing comprehensive background research, analyzing our data and results and visualizing them meaningfully, and drawing key conclusions and publishing them. This was all done computationally (in this role we used Excel for data analysis). Looking back on my undergraduate research and studies, in which I used Unix to model circumstellar material and radiative processes of binary stars and in various courses used programming (Mathematica, Java) to answer a myriad of mathematical and physical questions, I knew this was a direction I more enjoyed. The beauty and power of manipulating a program, being immersed inside another language and world and having total control over its structure, receiving immediate feedback on its effectiveness each time its run and being able to change and improve in real time, and developing a clean, elegant, efficient and optimized solution to a given problem are all such rewarding and attractive aspects that draw me and my personality type to coding.
Then there are the other considerations for who I am and how I want life to look, beyond knowing I want to be involved in a technical role where I can problem solve. Being highly self-driven and independent, I would love to fill a role where I have some creative autonomy over what I am working on, and hold a position of authority over the work. I’d love to be involved with big picture level projects and analysis, as even though I’m highly detail oriented, a larger scale with understanding of the implications and conclusions of the work are where I function best and am most passionate. I’ve always been a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ type, with many different interests across several disciplines. Data science uniquely allows me to investigate and solve problems in many different areas and maintain my love for new and different information in many fields. I’ve known since I was a child that I want a life that facilitates travel, and living in many different places all over the world. I’d like to increase my earning potential and develop a sense of financial security, which my childhood was severely lacking. I’d like to still devote part of myself and life to music, and hence have a life with a versatile schedule and ability to work remotely. All of these reasons, plus the passion for the type of work itself as outlined above, points me to data science. I am honestly so grateful for the opportunity this pandemic provided for me to slow down and reevaluate, and have the time to reorient my life in these directions.
There is a word in Sanskrit, the very first word of the Yoga Sutra; “atha”. In English, it translates to “now”, but the word is impregnated with a sense of auspiciousness, of now, right now, being the moment in which one can accept the invitation to follow the path to their destiny. This moment being now, as it exists only after all of the other moments and experiences that have poised you to be exactly ready to accept that invitation. And the beauty is that that moment, now, is all the time. In each moment we have the choice to accept the invitation again and again, endlessly. And certainly, we will, as the journey to know and honor the self is an endless one.
And so I am accepting the invitation, listening to my own heart and desires from a firmly grounded and authentic relationship with self, and pursuing Python and Data Science and manifesting my destiny.
As a fun aside, I love that my coding language of choice is called Python, that too feels highly serendipitous. In Yogic and Hindu mythology, Patanjali the author of the Yoga Sutra is the avatar (earthly incarnation) of Adishesha or Ananta Shesha, the king of snakes; Ananta meaning endless, the iconography of the snake represents the endless journey one undertakes in meeting the self. Adopting Python as my area of expertise seems another small nod that I’m on the right path. :) Thanks for reading and welcome to the journey!
