Let's Try This Again...
Another Attempt at a Blog
In the process of migrating my Portfolio/Blog site from WordPress to a Python backend, I deleted any initial blog posts on my first site. Although unfortunate, it was only a blog or two describing my current life and why the website came into existence along with any plans for the future. Considering so much has changed since the launch of my first site, I figure it might be better to start fresh...
Hi, I'm Mackenzie Fahey and I am a Data Scientist working in the healthcare industry with an M.Sc. in chemistry!
My interests in programming, technology, and using it to understand the world began when I was an undergraduate student studying biochemistry. I quickly realized that programmatically being able to navigate/visualize/understand datasets would save me quite a bit of time. I spent months outside of my course work learning computer science through python and I fell in love. Most of the work was initially hacking away at random numerical and scientific problems while learning about data structures and algorithms.
When I completed my undergraduate degree, I was enamored with the possibility of working in research. I loved the idea of being able to identify a field to focus on, learning everything about the field, and implementing state-of-the-art tools and technologies to answer questions or solve problems in the field. With this interest, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in chemistry. I then spent the next seven years struggling through an extremely poor situation (a story for a different time), but it wasn't all a waste. During my graduate school career, I had the opportunity to work with many brilliant individuals including data scientists that I learned from and grew with. Also, the intangible skills I gained in graduate school are invaluable. This includes communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking just to include a few. On top of this, I was able to freely work on a variety of software development/data engineering projects in my research (see portfolio) that helped me build a solid technical skill set and portfolio of projects.
Then, in March of 2020, most of the world changed. The COVID-19 pandemic became a global health emergency, and I could not physically complete the work needed for my thesis. This gave me a lot of time to reflect on my time in chemical research and the future I wanted for myself. At that moment, I decided to leave graduate school with my M.Sc. to pursue a career where I can still investigate and learn about the world, but on my terms. It took a variety of factors, but for myself, I had a family that I wanted to spend more time with, a career that I could better dictate, and my experience in academia left me with little happiness or satisfaction. With the decision made I packaged my portfolio, updated my resume, and started to apply for positions to begin my data science career!
It didn't happen overnight, but after a couple of months of applications and interviews, I found a position working with data in healthcare. I am now more happy, motivated, and excited than I have been in a long time but one thing I still want to have in my career is the ability to teach and share with others. This portfolio/blog site aims to help me with that. Although this site demonstrates my capabilities to potential employers/collaborators, it also teaches interested observers how the projects were built and the thinking that went into it. This site also allows me to talk about science, technology, data, and the relationship these things have with the world! So, that's what this is and what I want it to be.
One of the things I have planned for the upcoming months is a series of posts related to small projects I was asked to complete during my interview process. When I started, I was not coming from a computer science background, and I was terrified (Spoiler: It wasn't so bad). Hopefully, this short series can demonstrate the expectations of an interviewer and how readers can be successful when writing code for these exercises! Along with this, I plan on continually adding personal projects and blogs to keep interested parties satisfied (and to work on my writing). I hope you enjoy it!