Jump Start Data Science Alumni Meetup
July 10th, 2020
This week’s alumni was Tommy Jones who graduated from William and Mary in 2009 with a degree in economics. He began the talk by sharing his journey to his current position (or should I say positions as he is currently balancing four different jobs). Mr. Jones began his journey in the Navy and later decided to continue his education. He first took some classes online, and eventually ended up at William and Mary studying international relations. After nearly completing all of the requirements for the International Relations major he discovered economics and fell in love. Mr. Jones ditched International Relations and took a deep dive into math and economics. Additionally, while he was at school Mr. Jones mentioned that he worked as a research assistant at the Global Research Institute, which gave him his first opportunity to conduct research outside of the classroom setting; multiple alumni have highlighted the importance of doing outside research when preparing for life after college.
After graduating Mr. Jones bounced around from different jobs, working at various times with the White House and different startups, and as a result, was eventually sucked into the field of data science. He currently works at in-Q-Tel, but he is also involved in Data Community DC, as well as many other data science projects and organizations. Mr. Jones is also working on his PhD where he is looking at natural language processing. He spent some time discussing how hard it is to code different languages into one common computer language because of the vocabularies and syntax or different languages can vary so greatly.
During the questions and answers portion of the meetup, Mr. Jones went into more detail about natural language processing and on how his time in the navy helped shape his interests in data science. Mr. Jones also discussed topography (GIS) in data science and mentioned that GIS is big in the intelligence community, which was exciting for me to hear are that is my main area of interest. To wrap up Mr. Jones stated that he is convinced that Machine learning and statistics are the same thing just with different names. His advice to us was that having some idea of how computers work, or at the very least having some glancing interaction with them, is vital to a student’s success in the working world as he believes that a familiarity with computers will place us far ahead of the pack.