This is a portfolio of my work in the BS Data Management & Data Analysis (BSDMDA) and MS Data Analysis (MSDA) degree programs at Western Governors University. I completed my education to make a career change into data science, and this portfolio showcases that work for prospective employers, while also providing useful resources for other students following behind me in those programs. I benefitted tremendously from the tips and advice of prior students throughout my educational journey, and this is a part of my ongoing issue to return the favor and ensure more people get up the ladder that I've finished climbing.
The below table contains all of the work performed for my MSDA (graduated Mar 2023) and my capstone for my BSDMDA (graduated Jun 2022). Employers will find the most use from clicking on the "Class Summary" links to get descriptions of a class, its requisite projects, and summaries of how I completed them, including links to those materials. Students will find the most use from clicking on the "Class Writeup" links to read my posts from the WGU_MSDA subreddit where I covered my experiences with each class, including stumbling blocks, useful resources, etc. Links directly to reports, video presentations, etc. are also directly available in the table.
(Note that only the capstone for my BSDMDA is included here. Other technical projects for my BSDMDA were primarily completed as a part of the Udacity Data Analyst NanoDegree (portfolio here) which was a portion of that degree, while a few others were completed as transfer credits at Study.com (portfolio here).)
The above works represent the cumulative effort spend over 26 months to go from 0 college credits or programming experience to having a master's degree in the field of data science. While I'm aware that I have limited professional experience, it is my hope that the effort demonstrated in this process emphasizes that I am deeply motivated to continue to learn in this field and to make the most of any opportunity given to me. Any hiring represents some amount of risk or uncertainty, but I believe that this drive to learn and succeed combined with my soft skills and life experiences from a career in public service and my perspective as an "elder milennial" make me an excellent candidate to take that chance on, so that I can grow with an organization and we can enjoy a long and fruitful partnership.
While the majority of my work above (and in my other portfolios) involves Python programming and data analysis in particular, something I would like to emphasize to prospective employers is that I am flexible in what I am looking for. While the bulk of my experience is in Python and analysis, I do have some experience with SQL and data management (1) (2) (3) (4) (5). I am open to and see benefits in working in data management or other fields within data science, as I understand that I would be well served by expanding the scope of my knowledge and experience within the field.
As always, the biggest thanks goes out to my wife, Shannon. I went back to school in January 2021, uncertain if I was too old to learn my way around the tech industry or to learn something like Python programming. She picked up the slack to make sure that we could afford for me to pursue my education and make a career change, and she was also my cheerleader throughout the whole process. She was even willing to be a student, letting me teach some Python back to her early on so that I could really learn some of these concepts. None of this would've been possible without her. My success is entirely a credit to her.
Another huge debt of gratitude goes out to the community at r/WGU_MSDA/ and everyone wh participates there in sharing their experiences, mistakes, and resources throughout the program. It was a pretty inactive subreddit when I started, but Chuck was going through the program ahead of me and started posting his experiences on each class there. Those were super helpful to me, and as I started posting my own experiences there as well, I think we really got that community going a bit. I've enjoyed helping others coming through the program after me, and I hope it carries on. Bonus points to Chris for helping get me unstuck at the finish line with some excellent resources for the capstone.
Musical acknowledgements go out to the amazing TPR (buy his albums!) and Karl Casey of White Bat Audio. My wife jokes that she never knows if coming into my office is going to sound like a rave or a meditation chamber, and that's exactly the way I like it. TPR's video game covers and original works on the piano are more relaxing than melancholic, while Karl Casey's synthwave productions range from mellow to intense, great for getting into "the zone". I listened to a lot of their work throughout my MSDA.
Like my prior portfolios for Udacity and Study.com, the Table Generator was a super useful tool to allow me to build the nice looking table up above in a GUI to then be copy and pasted into this document as markdown. There's no reason to make a markdown table yourself when you could do it much more easily with the Table Generator.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent