A career that affords flexibility and personal growth, why not check it out? — “Do what you’re passionate about.” Everybody says that. So why not do something you love for work, follow your passion and enjoy your long career. Sounds easy, right? But at 18–25, who knows what they love or what they are passionate about? The answer? Not many people. A person changes…

A roadmap to soft skill success! The newest trend data influencers are focusing on is talking about how you need to know soft skills to get the job. Every other post on LinkedIn is “Soft skills > technical skills” or “Learn how to communicate”. So yes, you do need to…

Channel your inner data-loving self, even if you don’t consider yourself a coder — Every day when I open R and look at my code, I think about either how poorly it is written or try to figure out how I wrote something so complex. If you have coded before, you have had this feeling x100 over, or maybe more. …

Using relevant tweets to understand how people feel about brands (Now you can put that on your resume!) — Brands are essential. They live in our minds as ideas and each person constantly interacts with hundreds of brands a day, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively. But what is their role in data science? Well given most tech is fueled by strong business brands, it is probably essential for any data…

Using R to graph how female representation in government has increased over the past 24 years for International Women’s Day. Hint, it's not enough! — Happy International Women’s Day! In the spirit of the day, I wanted to do a post celebrating the many wonderful women of this world. In keeping with my political analytics topics, I thought it would be interesting to look at the proportion of women are in government by country, and…

Going from storytelling Presidential Approval Ratings to making a movie about it with R! — In my last post, I demonstrated how you can create graphs and text that tell a nice story about how much the American public approved of each of the past 14 Presidents! So, how about we make the information more fun to watch? Luckily, R can accomplish this. With the…

Use text, vertical lines and relevant titles to tell a story of Presidential Approval Ratings in R! — A few weeks ago, I tuned into an RStudio talk by John Burn-Murdoch about reporting and visualizing the COVID pandemic. As a data journalist at the Financial Times, he has been extremely influential over the past year creating well-known charts and graphics about the spread of COVID and it’s toll…

The Reputational Consequences of Robinhood’s Broken Brand Promise — Robinhood and his merry band of outlaws. Throughout the week that relationship was strong in the world of Wall Street and the financial markets, as the Robinhood app enabled a merry band of “Reddit bros” to challenge big institutional hedge funds at their own game — a quasi steal from…

Visualizing approval polls across Presidents over the past 75 years — Okay, you got me. Stability and Donald Trump are not two terms that are usually seen in the same sentence. But overlooking policy, events and Twitter rants, Trump’s presidency characterized a level of stability we have not seen in Presidential history in one way–Approval Ratings. I present the chart-du-jour so…