For Love Data Week 2022, we are highlighting our FSU STEM Libraries Data Fellows! These posts, written by the fellows themselves, tell their stories of how they became interested in data-related work and their experience as a data fellow to this point. Today’s post is contributed by William-Elijah Clark.
It’s hard to say exactly when I first got interested in data. After all, my mother was a statistician, so I’ve always been surrounded by data since I was in elementary school — from Arkansas Department of Health public health and mortality statistics to Disney World focus groups and market research. Personally, I started liking statistics when I took UCF’s equivalent to QMB 3200 and Econometrics. This experience extended into being a research assistant at UCF, and even into conducting and monitoring surveys at Universal Orlando Resort! Through my Econometrics course and from additional professional development opportunities at Universal, I was also able gain experience with R (although I didn’t learn it to the extent that I would call myself a professional data analyst or a data scientist.)
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in Orlando back in 2020, I decided to go back to school here at Florida State University for Statistics, especially considering that FSU has a SAS coding certificate! Overall, I came to Florida State University with over two years of professional survey experience between academia and hospitality industry work.
I spent time in 2020 taking calculus courses and statistics electives here at FSU to hone my data analysis skills further. I then saw an opportunity to apply for a FSU Libraries data fellowship beginning in Fall 2021. I decided to apply, as this position would give me the opportunity to utilize some of the skills I obtained from my previous positions and coursework at UCF and FSU, and hopefully develop some new skills to further myself in my goals of becoming a data analyst (and hopefully even an econometrician).
So far in my fellowship here at FSU Libraries, I have had the opportunity to gain some experience with MATLAB and SQL through the Data @ Your Desk workshops at Dirac, as well as some experience writing surveys in Qualtrics (as opposed to just conducting and monitoring surveys). I’ve also had the opportunity to learn more about citation management, library research, and data management. I’ve even been able to explain concepts for MS Excel to a patron via the online “Ask a Data Librarian” feature on the FSU Libraries website. This all said, I’m looking forward to applying some of my previous R coding and statistical analysis skills to some survey data for FSU Libraries this semester.
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