STEM Data Fellow Spotlight: Sahil Chugani

When I was in elementary school, I remember Googling various football statistics, running down to my parents, and telling them, for example,  “Ben Roethlisberger had 4,328 passing yards in 2009!” I played football for eight years from elementary school to high school, and I was good with working with numbers. I found that sports analytics was a great combination of the two. In high school, I entered a sports analytics competition, where my project was to determine what would happen if onside kicks in football would be replaced with a 4th down and 15, and I absolutely loved it. Now, I’m fascinated with data science as a whole– being able to make a computer do something that we could never imagine doing as humans is an amazing feeling for me.

Since the sports analytics competition, I’ve been doing anything and everything I could related to data science. Some of the research I’m currently working on includes sports team values, kickstarter data, and sportswashing (for example, Qatar holding the World Cup amidst some controversial political issues). I also had a job this year working for a company called Scouting Heroes, where I logged basic statistics for the FSU football team. (More information on what the data I collected was for can be found at https://simplebet.io/nfl.html.) I’ve also worked on creating data visualizations based on football data. For example, this past summer I created over 20 graphs that can be found at https://twitter.com/a_graph_a_day .

In one of my classes, one of my (now) coworkers, William-Elijah Clark, posted the opening for the STEM Libraries Data Fellowship in the class’s GroupMe, and I was eager to apply. Something I’m super excited for with this Data Fellowship is that I really want to translate my skills into some real-world experience. Instead of simply creating graphs or finding statistics on my own, I want to have a tangible impact with regard to data. I hope to be able to help students out with their needs or be able to have my data analysis translate into a decision being made that affects people. In a way, it would signify that my hard work on data analysis is paying off. 

One of the projects that I’m super interested in working on as a Data Fellow is the use of Jupyter Books to assist users in learning more about how to code and analyze data as a whole. By offering interactive code blocks and giving users the opportunity to run code on their own, they may be more willing to learn about the data analysis techniques used. Furthermore, I hope that by implementing sports analytics examples, specifically football, people who are interested in sports may be more willing to learn how to use data analysis techniques with respect to sports.

As a whole, I’m very excited to learn more about data analysis techniques here at the FSU libraries and as well as apply my skills to tangibly help others at Florida State as a whole. 

This blog post was written by Sahil Chugani, STEM Data Fellow at FSU Libraries.

STEM Data Fellow Spotlight: Reagan Bourne

Prior to my experience at Florida State University, I took a few research classes in high school. In these classes, I had assignments where I would have to collect and analyze data as part of a research project. These experiences sparked my interest in data science, and from that point forward I always knew that I was interested in data-related research. Furthermore, I have always been interested in a few different subjects, including computer science, biology, and mathematics. I never realized that I would be able to combine my interests before starting this data fellowship.

When I first found this fellowship during the summer of 2022, I felt that I was at an academic crossroads. I was unsure of what I wanted to study and my career goals. However, I was extremely interested in this opportunity, because it was unlike anything I had ever really known about. I thought that this position would be a great learning opportunity for me, and would  hopefully allow me to utilize my data skills and pursue some of my interests. So far, this fellowship has gone above and beyond what I was hoping for. 

As I am still in the beginning of my academic career, I have not had the opportunity to obtain much experience using my data skills before this fellowship. For this reason, I am so grateful to be participating in this fellowship. I have already learned so many different things in my few months here. One of my first assignments was to meet with many of the different librarians at FSU Libraries. I really enjoyed this task, because I liked hearing about all of the different paths that were taken until finding this career. It introduced me to a lot of different projects and areas of expertise in the library that I had never known about, such as the Health Data Sciences Initiative and open science. 

Another concept that I have recently learned a lot about is the importance of critically evaluating data. Working on a blog post about this topic has been a great learning experience for me. It has introduced me to so many ideas that I had never known about.  Specifically, I have learned about machine learning algorithms for data science. As a student currently pursuing a computer science degree with a minor in data analytics, this topic was extremely interesting to me, and is something that I am excited to explore further. 

As I take more classes related to my major, I am excited to apply the skills I learn towards this fellowship. In the future I hope to teach workshops about Unix, C#, SQL, and many more.  I am looking forward to continuing my work with the FSU Libraries.

This blog post was written by Reagan Bourne, STEM Data Fellow at FSU Libraries.

FSU Libraries celebrates Love Data Week 2023!

Introduction

Love Data Week is coming back to FSU in 2023! Love Data Week, or LDW, is an international event where individuals and groups are encouraged to host and participate in activities related to any and all data. It occurs every week that Valentine’s Day lands, and focuses on helping people learn about the best data management practices and methods for interpreting data. LDW was started in 2015 and is headed by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. For those looking to learn more about data or are interested in statistics, this is an excellent opportunity to ask questions and get started!

Events

Because looking at raw data can sometimes be boring, we’re looking to spice things up this year by including two new activities! We’ll be right inside the entrance of Dirac from 12:00 – 2:00 PM on Thursday and Strozier from 12:00-2:00 PM on Friday! First, we’re going to be doing an Adopt-a-Dataset activity, where participants will be able to “adopt” one of the openly available datasets we have displayed. Your task will then be to determine what conclusions can be drawn from the data, and you’ll receive a Dum-Dum for your work! After that, we’ll have a jar of Smarties at the table, with a list of numbers from a normal distribution on hand. From there, you’ll have to guess the number of smarties in the jar, and the person with the closest guess will win them all! In addition to the tabling events, our Research Data Management Librarian, Dr. Nick Ruhs, will be giving a workshop on Data Analysis with Microsoft Excel on Valentine’s Day (February 14) from 3:00-4:30. If you are or will be using Excel for your projects or research and are looking to enhance your skills, this will be a great workshop to attend!

Blog Posts

In addition to the wonderful events that are occurring during Love Data Week, we will be publishing two blog posts introducing the two new Data Fellows at FSU, Reagan Bourne and Sahil Chugani. In those posts, you’ll learn all about what inspired them to become a data fellow and how they became passionate about data analysis and management techniques.

Contact/Resources

For more information about any data questions/concerns you may have, you can either check out https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/pages/ or contact Dr. Nick Ruhs, our resident Research Data Management Librarian, at nruhs@fsu.edu. Furthermore, if you ever need any assistance with any data question you may have, you can check out the walk-up hours for our STEM Data Fellows!

This blog post was written by Sahil Chugani (STEM Data Fellow) from FSU Libraries.