11th August ’16 started off with some mock interviewing and career sessions at McCombs. At 5pm, four of us girls, exhausted and yet enthusiastic, shared a cab and reached the imposing Indeed.com building at 6pm. We were attending a data science meet up to meet with 30 other brilliant people in data science. As we reached the reception area, we were greeted by the Indeed folks and were ushered into the meet up room.
Despite the exhausting day, we were surprised to find that we could hold intelligent “data science-y” conversations with other women in the room about their projects, work, etc.. We met an interesting medley of brilliant women working in varied backgrounds and projects some of which were assessing the structural damage progression in patients with rhematoid arthritis. It was fascinating to us because it just proved to us that analytics and statistics is indeed ubiquitous. Grabbing some food that was arranged for us, we attended interesting sessions about p values, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. It served as a good revision for us since we had just completed our summer semester the previous week and we’d covered a lot of ground in statistics in our predictive analytics class. At the end of it, we had a couple of lighting talks by Julie Di Carlo [ http://stanford.academia.edu/
At the end of the three hours, we were still full of energy to go home and Google all the new stuff we learnt about. Exhaustion? I don’t think we even realized we were so exhausted. What a day to cherish.
– Akshata and Mengnan