About Me

My name is Renee M. P. Teate, and I’m becoming a Data Scientist. Follow me on twitter at @BecomingDataSci.

What is Data Science?

I gave a talk about it!

Why Data Science?

Click to read my “Why Data Science?” post

My Starting Point

My Educational & Work Background

  • Undergraduate degree in Integrated Science and Technology from James Madison University
  • Working on Masters degree in Systems Engineering from University of Virginia (started 8 years after finishing undergrad)
  • Graduate Courses Completed before pursuit of Data Science:
    • Discrete Event Stochastic Simulation
    • Statistics for Engineers and Scientists
    • Systems Engineering Management
    • Software Project Management
    • Convex Optimization and Linear Programming
  • Have been the co-owner and Vice President of a small database/web/software development company for 10 years, where I’ve been lead developer and database designer
  • Worked as a Data Analyst at Rosetta Stone, and now working as a Data Analyst and Report Developer in the Division of Advancement at JMU (basically the fundraising arm of the school).

Main technologies used pre-Data-Science-pursuit

  • SQL (for MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, and Access databases), PL/SQL, ASP.NET, VB.NET, VBA, HTML, CSS, some PHP, advanced MS Excel for data analysis, MS Access, SunGard/Ellucian Advance, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, IBM Cognos, various web analytics tools, tiny bit of R and MatLab in class

Formal Programming and Math Courses

  • Learned VB6 in college from a professor that brought out my love of programming
  • Excelled in an Access/SQL/ASP/HTML database & web interface course in college (where I realized I was good at designing relational databases)
  • AP Statistics & Calculus in High School
  • Statistics and Calculus in Undergrad
  • Linear Algebra summer course at local college
  • Just about everything else programming-related is self-taught post-undergrad, and math-related is via grad classes above

And that’s about it! Reading the above, you can get a feel for my “starting point” on my path to Becoming A Data Scientist!

Goals

Click to read my “Goals” post

Added 10/31/2015:

Things I Want To Highlight Here

This site (becomingadatascientist.com) is my personal blog documenting my data science learning. I tweet regularly about data science and interact with followers at @becomingdatasci. Here’s an article I wrote about learning things using Twitter.

I share the best data science articles I find in this Flipboard magazine, and bookmark tutorials in this Flipboard magazine.

I’m building a Data Science Learning Directory, which I plan to grow into much more, at DataSciGuide.com. The blog for that site is here, and includes posts on things like Books for People that Might Be Interested in Data Science.

Here are videos of me talking to Girl Develop It about “A Day in the Life of a Data Analyst” and a short version of my “What is Data Science?” talk, and being interviewed by BPDM about Becoming a Data Scientist. I was also interviewed on local radio a couple years ago.

Here is my resume.

Update January 2016:
I started the Becoming a Data Scientist Podcast in December, and the first episode was me talking about my own experiences, so you can learn more About Me there! You should also check out the Data Science Learning Club I started along with the podcast!