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Impacting Your Community As a Data Scientist

How to be impactful with data science skills to gain "real-world" experiences.

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash
Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

One of the major challenges I have found as a newbie data scientist is the inability to break into the field due to a lack of "real-world experience". Even though there are many great boot camps that provide professionals to work on passion projects, I have noticed that it still takes some time for new data scientists to get jobs at many companies.

I have found a "hack" to gaining experience and fast-tracking a newbie to applying their Data Science skills on real-world projects. I will outline some of my experiences here on how I found myself working on a multi-million dollar project in my local community here in Fitchburg, Massachusetts all because I was able to find opportunities and volunteer my skills to stakeholders that needed them most.

After I graduated from Metis Data Science Bootcamp, I found myself freshly minted with machine learning and data science skills but could not find any meaningful projects that I could work on. Even after working on multiple online tutorials and projects, it didn’t seem significant to me because it was not used on a daily basis by actual people. So, I took the following steps to ensure that I could use my skills in a way that could have a significant impact.

  1. Interviewing local business leaders: In 2021, I decided to spend some time in my local community discussing with business owners, Government officials, residents, and students to try and understand some challenges that there were facing. I asked many open-ended questions with no specific goal in mind but to see where I could use my skills to be of help. The time spent here actually gave me a great opportunity to learn much about the history of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, its customs, and its people. I made great friends through this process in the area and built amazing relationships.
Interviewing a local small business owner. Image by Author
Interviewing a local small business owner. Image by Author
  1. Uncovering Insights from Discussions: Through my conversations with different leaders, and after sending out surveys. I was able to uncover that the municipalities were facing some huge challenges.
  2. The Big Problems: The problems faced were that about 30 million dollars a year were spent out of the city due to a general lack of availability of certain kinds of businesses in Fitchburg and awareness of new businesses. For instance, Fitchburg residents would drive about 30 minutes to an hour to patronize businesses in bigger cities like Boston, Cambridge, and Worcester when some of those businesses are 5–15 minutes away from them. This is a huge problem because the "money drain" i.e. money spent out of the community in the long run affects a lot of small businesses, community, and economic developments. The community leaders have created a 5–10-year plan to solve this problem and encouraged me to create solutions that could be useful.
  3. Real-world data solutions and impact: I was able to work on two specific projects to tackle the problem of business awareness and business availability in the area. The first project was to help increase local business awareness in the area, and the second was to help improve the process of opening new businesses in town. In terms of business awareness, I built SeeksCo, a yelp for small towns and cities to allow individuals to easily find businesses in the area and provide reviews to these businesses. So far, SeeksCo is helping raise awareness for these businesses.
Discussing with the owner of Espresso Pizza (started over 50 years ago). Image by Author.
Discussing with the owner of Espresso Pizza (started over 50 years ago). Image by Author.

The second project involved working with the mayor’s office to build a data visualization (using Tableau) of storefront vacancies within the Fitchburg downtown area. This project would allow investors and future business owners to view storefront property vacancies that they can rent or buy in the area with granular information such as the most recent picture, the owner’s information, and the state of the property. Currently, there are over 100 vacant properties in Fitchburg and many opportunities for small businesses to open up to service the over 40,000 citizens in the area. The impact of this project can be seen directly as it saves time for business leaders, investors, and other stakeholders. In the past, individuals had to manually search for this information but now they can access this data after requesting from the local economic government offices.

Empty vacancy storefront present in Fitchburg. Image by Author.
Empty vacancy storefront present in Fitchburg. Image by Author.

With both projects, I was able to present the work to both local leaders and global leaders on the role data can play in the community and how to encourage best data practices.

  1. Continued Support in The Community: As a data scientist even though our work is primarily focused on data and algorithms, I personally believe that the best way to come up with solutions is to create meaningful insights from the data. By understanding the stories of individuals that the data analysis affects, our work can be better.

This is why I volunteered to help organize events in the Fitchburg community to help increase awareness of small businesses. I worked with a local organization called Reimagine North of Main to organize a block party to promote many small businesses in the summer of 2021. We had over 500 people in attendance and many small businesses were able to acquire new customers.

Organizing a block party for small businesses. Image by Author.
Organizing a block party for small businesses. Image by Author.

My experiences in my local community were helpful when I started interviewing for a data science job. I was able to discuss real-world projects when interviewing for data science jobs and accepted an offer to work as a data scientist consultant in a modern consulting firm in the Boston area. Many of my interview discussions revolved around the impact work that I had done in my community and provided me an opportunity to explain in terms that data science professionals could understand.

In conclusion, the data science field is a fast-paced field that could feel had to break into but finding creative ways to utilize one’s acquired skills in a manner that can actually be useful for real people has immense benefits in boosting not only our data scientist skills but also benefiting people that do need our help immediately.

For more on my impact work, please visit my page: dotunopasina.com/impact and connect with me on LinkedIn.


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