Hi, my name is Bram and I’ve always dreamed of becoming a Data Scientist! If you think I’m kidding, you’re 100% correct. Truth be told, I’ve never thought of becoming a data scientist or do anything data related. However, at a young age, I had an affinity for leveraging domain knowledge and exploiting opportunity to advance my agenda. Which domain knowledge you ask? Pokemon cards. When I was seven, I moved to the states from Jakarta, Indonesia. My parents worked long hours to provide for me and my three siblings. We did chores out of responsibility, and because our parents told us so. What we didn’t realize, until it was too late was, our friends were also doing chores but were getting paid for it. It was a sad realization on our part, but I believe we benefited from it. Back to Pokemon cards! Essentially, I used my “domain” knowledge to trade with friends for cash, or game consoles that I desired and did not want to pay for.
Throughout my career in manufacturing and finance, I’ve always enjoyed creating efficiency, maximizing productivity and generating profits using data. I was intrigued and impressed by people who had the ability to code, manipulate data, create impactful visualization and providing insight in an organized and simplified manner. And after undergoing extensive research and reflection, I decided to pursue a career in data science. Why?
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I have tendency to analyze things. Whether I’m screening through a publicly traded company’s 10-K or playing monopoly with my friends. I have a tendency explore and question the information presented to determine an outcome that will best serve my agenda. Whether it’s making a stock purchase or purchasing a monopoly property.
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Pragmatic thinking. In my past experience, I’ve showed the capability to understand the business, think “out of the box” and generally have a good sense of business, thus creating company value.
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Probability and application. Theories and probabilities are fun to talk about, But I enjoy applying things I learned to produce results and use feedback to improve upon.
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Lifelong student. I believe learning is a lifelong pursuit and is a necessity to be relevant no matter what field you’re in.
With data exponentially growing in size year after year, there is vast opportunities to process, clean and create actionable items using data reinforcement. This is exciting because we have the opportunity to harness information to create something new or improve upon existing systems or processes. In conclusion, I wanted to learn data science to make better decisions, in order to create value.