241: Data Science Science with Adam Ross Nelson

01:25 - Teaching, Learning, and Education

06:16 - Becoming a Data Scientist

• Opportunities to Create New Knowledge
• Data Science Science

19:36 - Solving Bias in Data Science

• Weapons of Math Destruction

23:36 - Recommendations for Aspiring Data Scientists

• Hire a Career Coach
• Creating and Maintaining a Portfolio * Make a Rosetta Stone
  • Make a Cheat Sheet
  • Write an Article on a Piece of Software You Dislike
    • A Few Times, I’ve Broken Pandas
    • Kyle Kingsbury Posts
  • Contribute to Another Project
    • Post On Project Contribution
• Spend $$$/Invest on Transition
• Bet On Yourself

45:36 - Impostor Syndrome

• Immunity Boosts
  • Community
  • Know Your Baseline
    • Clance Impostor Phenomenon Test
    • Dr. Pauline Rose Clance
    • The Imposter Phenomenon: An Internal Barrier To Empowerment and Achievement by Pauline Rose Clance and Maureen Ann O'Toole
      
  • Disseminate Knowledge
• Confidence Leads to Confidence
• Dunning-Kruger Effect
• Johari Window

Reflections:

Mae: Checking out the metrics resources on Impostor Syndrome listed above.

Casey: Writing about software in a positive, constructive tone.

Mando: Investing in yourself. from:sheaserrano bet on yourself

Adam: Talking about career, data science, and programming in a non-technical way. Also, Twitter searches for book names!

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Transcript:

MANDO: Good afternoon, everyone! Welcome to Greater Than Code. This is Episode number 241. I'm Mando Escamilla and I'm here with my friend, Mae Beale.

MANDO: Hi, there! And I am also here with Casey Watts.

CASEY: Hi, I am Casey! And we're all here with Adam Ross Nelson, our guest today.

Welcome, Adam.

ADAM: Hi, everyone! Thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad to be here.

CASEY: Since 2020, Adam is a consultant who provides research, data science, machine learning, and data governance services. Previously, he was the inaugural data scientist at The Common Application which provides undergraduate college application platforms for institutions around the world. He holds a PhD from The University of Wisconsin: Madison in Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis.

Adam is also formerly an attorney with a history of working in higher education, teaching all ages, and educational administration. He is passionate about connecting with other data professionals in-person and online. For more information and background look for his insights by connecting with Adam on LinkedIn, Medium, and other online platforms.

We are lucky we have him here today. So Adam, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

ADAM: I spent so much time thinking about this question, I really wasn't sure what to say. I hadn't thought about my superpower in a serious way in a very long time and I was tempted to go whimsy with this, but I got input from my crowd and my tribe and where I landed was teaching, learning, and education.

You might look at my background with a PhD in education, leadership, and policy analysis, all of my work in education administration, higher education administration, and teaching and just conclude that was how I acquired the superpower. But I think that superpower goes back much further and much deeper.

So when I was a kid, I was badly dyslexic. Imagine going through life and you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase B and a lowercase D. Indistinguishable to me. Also, I had trouble with left and right. I didn't know if someone told me turn left here, I'd be lucky to go – I had a 50/50 chance of going in the right direction, basically. Lowercase P and Q were difficult.

For this podcast, the greater than sign, I died in the math unit, or I could have died in the math unit when we were learning greater than, or less than. Well, and then another one was capital E and the number 3, couldn't tell a difference. Capital E and number 3. I slowly developed mnemonics in order to learn these things. So for me, the greater than, less than pneumonic is, I don't know if you ever think about it, but think of the greater than, or less than sign as an alligator and it's hungry. So it's always going to eat the bigger number. [laughs] It’s always going to eat the bigger quantity. So once I figured that mnemonic out and a bunch of other mnemonics, I started doing a little bit better.

My high school principal told my parents that I would be lucky to graduate high school and there's all kinds. We can unpack that for days, but.

MANDO: Yeah.

ADAM: Right? Like what kind of high school principal says that to anybody, which resonates with me now in hindsight, because everything we know about student learning, the two most influential factors on a student's ability to learn are two things. One, teacher effectiveness and number two, principal leadership. Scholarship always bears out.

MAE: Whoa.

ADAM: Yeah. So the principal told my family that and also, my household growing up, I was an only child. We were a very poor household; low income was an understatement. So my disadvantages aside, learning and teaching myself was basically all I had. I was the kid who grew up in this neighborhood, I had some friends in the neighborhood, and I was always exploring adjacent areas of the neighborhoods. I was in a semi-rural area. So there were wooded areas, there were some streams, some rivers, some lakes and I was always the kid that found something new. I found a new trail, a new street, a new whatever and I would run back to my neighborhood and I'd be like, “Hey everybody, I just found something. Look what I found, follow me and I will show you also. I will show you the way and I'll show you how cool that is.”

MAE: Aw.

ADAM: I love this thinking. [laughs]

MAE: I love that!

CASEY: Sharing.

ADAM: I'm glad because when I'm in the classroom, when I'm teaching – I do a lot of corporate training now, too. When I'm either teaching in a traditional university classroom, or in corporate setting, that is me reliving my childhood playtime. It's like, “Hey everybody, look at this cool thing that I have to show you and now I'm going to show it to you, also.”

So teaching, learning, and education is my superpower and in one way, that's manifested. When I finished school, I finished my PhD at 37. I wasn't 40 years old yet, if you count kindergarten had been in school for 23 years. Over half of my life, not half of my adult life, half of my entire life I was in school [chuckles] and now that I'm rounding 41—that was last week, I turned 41. Now that I'm rounding 41 –

MAE: Happy birthday!

ADAM: Thank you so much. Now that I'm rounding 41, I'm finally a little more than half of my life not in school.

MANDO: Congrats, man. That's an accomplishment. [laughs]

So I'm curious to know how you transitioned from that academic world into being a data scientist proper, like what got you to that point? What sets you down that path? Just that whole story. I think that'd be super interesting to talk about and dig into.

ADAM: Sure. I think context really matters; what was going on in the data science field at the time I finished the PhD. I finished that PhD in 2017. So in 2017, that was that the apex of – well, I don't know if it was, or maybe we're now at the apex. I don't know exactly where the apex was, or is, or will be, but there was a lot of excitement around data science as a field and as a career in about 3, or 4 years ago.

MANDO: For sure.

ADAM: So when I was finishing the PhD, I had the opportunity to tech up in my PhD program and gain a lot of the skills that others might have gained via other paths through more traditional computer science degrees, economics degrees, or bootcamps, or both. And then I was also in a position where I was probably—and this is common for folks with a PhD—probably one of the handful of people in the world who were a subject matter expert in a particular topic, but also, I had the technical skills to be a data scientist.

So there was an organization, The Common Application from the introduction, that was looking for a data scientist who needed domain knowledge