Open Source Internship - Azis Toktobaev

        I shifted from working on research for the book to creating original exercises and supplemental materials for the course. This is what I know how to do best when it comes to working in office environments - organizing materials to become well-structured, accessible, educational, and, most importantly, fun. I remember how I structured documentation in data management files for PAPER magazine's brand partnerships office. I was really thorough yet efficient throughout the process that later I was recommended for a special opportunity at the project management office to aid professionals with ADIDAS and Campari Group campaigns.          Now, working on original assignments, I constantly catch myself thinking introspectively of my experiences as a student and a Teaching Assistant. I think of all the times I wanted a certain part of an assignment to have better instructions or a different structure. On Monday, I finished the assignment...

        This is almost the end of week 5 of the Summer Institute, and it feels like the semester is just around the corner. We have about 3 weeks left, and we are already working on Chapters 6 and 8. We ended the day yesterday with a conceptual discussion on the way the book reads for students who have never had coding experience. It became clear that we need to introduce Python and layer Markdown and Jupyter Notebooks on top of it. So, I spent this morning writing a short introduction to Markdown, assuming that the students already know how to code. Dr. Jan and I later discussed my work, and in the conversation, we both realized that Markdown and Jupyter Notebook introduction needs to come before Python for students to have an environment for testing and learning their code. So, I re-wrote the section to make it more general and broad. I enjoyed working this way, because I got to capitalize on my talents as a self-starter, creating the section on the Notebook e...

        I believe it is important to start this blog post by talking about my parents for the reader potentially worried about them. I called them in the morning and my mom reassured me that she and my dad are not experiencing any fever. This is really good news, however, it is still too early to celebrate as it has only been about 6 days since the symptoms started, and they are still experiencing fatigue and sinus congestion. After the call with my parents I started working on the challenge that was introduced to me yesterday: finding a dataset for Chapter 8 of the How To Think Like a Data Scientist Book.            At first glance, it seemed that this chapter was going to be the easiest one to find as it dealt with textual analysis. However, after closely examining the exercises in the book, I realized that the chapter very closely focuses on the existing dataset, which means that there is practically no room for dataset swap...

        My second day of this internship/research experience. From one side, today's experience seemed easier than the one on Friday, my first day, as I had an idea of what this process was going to look like. On the other hand, for people with standard 8-5 jobs, Mondays are generally harder than Fridays, and I truly felt it while getting out of bed at 7 am. While seemingly mundane, this learning curve is very important for me to mention as this is the first time I truly got to recognize the dread that the word Monday had been bringing all these years to the office workers in my life. All of my previous labor experiences were on a flex-schedule. With this knowledge, I plan to be better prepared for the next Mondays to come, of which I only have 7 left. Time flies.          We started off the day with some group members rearrangement, during which some teams lost while others gained members. The Data Analytics group, my group, welcomed my...