"Hello, World!" Blog Post

"My Big Data 'Wow' Moment"

I'd been accepted to CCIS at Northeastern, but I wasn't super into computer science during the majority of my senior year in high school. It wasn't until I read this article -> Forbes Article Link in AP Psychology that my interest was peaked. (Ignoring the fact that it may have been fake) the fact that Target could predict a pregnancy using data boggled my mind. It was so gloriously creepy, and I wanted to be able to do that. 

Because my computer science interest was sparked so late, I went into my co-op search with little to no coding experience. To avoid the stress of technical interviews, I took my first job in a role that did not require any advanced technical abilities. Strangely, I ended my 6 months having completed countless coding projects. From reverse engineering a hurricane prediction model to creating a web application to estimate storm surge at a location given a lat/long. Looking back, if I had more knowledge on what to do with large sets of data, I could have worked on so many other extremely interesting projects.

My second co-op went about the same way. At Recorded Future, I had access to a very large and diverse data set. Over my 6 months there, I learned how to dip my toes into it, but I never got the chance, or had the know-how, to dive in. In my books, it's another large set of data that I missed a chance to do some really cool stuff with.

So far, I haven't been able to live up to 12th grade me's dreams of doing some creepy data magic. I'm looking forward to getting towards the end of this semester and getting to see what I can do for the final project. I hope that by the end of this course that not only will I have completed a successful data project, but I will know enough about the proper practices of a large data project so that I don't miss out on any other chances to ask/answer some tough 'big data' questions.

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