Tips for first-time mentors from a first-time mentor

This summer, I volunteered to be a mentor for a data science intern. It reminds me of my own internship 2 years ago, when I learned so much from my mentor (see my previous posts). Being a mentor not only allows me to view a summer internship from the other side of the table, but also presents new challenges and learning opportunities for myself. In this post, I will share some tips for first-time mentors from my experience as a first-time mentor. 

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How to nail a presentation

Now that we have done most of the hard work: numerous experiments, survey, coding, refactoring, pipelining, analysis, visualization, charts, numbers, written documents and so on, we are going to give a final presentation. “That’s easy,” one may think, “Just paste my results into PowerPoint slides and click through it.”

Having seen quite a lot of presentations at conferences, group meetings, and tech demos, and having given many presentations myself in different scenarios, one thing I can say for sure about presentations is that “It is not easy” at all. It is as demanding as most of the hard work we have done, and requires similar learning and practice as coding, analysis, and writing. In this post, I will summarize what I learned from my mentors, teachers, peers, as well as my own mistakes about presentations.

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北美博士的咨询申请之路

consulting yes or no or maybe?

声明:本文作者最近也开设了个人博客(https://yaqiongchen.com/),如有问题和评论,请直接进入原作者的博客 北美博士的咨询申请之路。这里的评论已关。

这篇稿子应博主Ju的邀约而写,主要是总结一下北美博士找咨询工作的经验和教训。我的背景是国内Top2本科,哥大生物专业博士,下个月入职一家咨询公司的New York Office。在求职期间得到了很多的帮助,希望也能尽一份自己的绵薄之力,帮到更多的后来人。

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DIY curriculum for post-school life

post-school

Last February, I defended my PhD thesis and graduated from more than 2 decades of school life. Now, it’s been a full year of post-school life. There are no more exams and curriculum to quantify my GPA. In this post-school life, I start to realize that I have to be the one setting my own goal, designing my own curriculum, and evaluating my progress introspectively. In this post, I am sharing some lessons that I find useful in DIY curriculum. 

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Do you write production code as a data scientist?

production

In the past month, I posted this question to my friends, peers, online tech forum, and got responses from more than 30 data scientists in various industries and different academic background and career path. The responses show a wide spectrum of data scientists’ involvement in production, and reveal some shared concerns about career development among data scientists.

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Not ready yet…Go!

I officially graduated from Columbia last Tuesday after my PhD thesis defense, and started to work full time immediately in the following week. This is the first week of my transition from academia to industry, and I already experience some culture shock in time management and prioritizing. Learning on the job is not only about the technical details, but also about the pattern of thinking.

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PhD转行之路 / Career paths for PhD in STEM

2021/8/14更新

关于上网课找工作的评论问题,我将不再回复。现在的工作行情跟我当时的情况已经很不一样,我对新生找工作的情况并不了解,大家最好问那些最近一两年刚找到工作的新生,得到更新的信息。

2020/10/02更新

我最近开设了一个YouTube频道,分享一些职业发展的心得和数据科学领域的知识。欢迎观看订阅!

写在前面

大概是免责声明吧,这里只是一家之言的心路历程,当然不是说这么做就一定会转行找到工作(那叫鸡汤文学),没有宣扬人人都可以做xx21世纪是xx的世纪,希望大家结合自己的实际情况,多跟业内外的人交流,多了解行业情况,对自己负责,切莫跟风:D

后续:工作一年半之后,我又写了一篇第一次跳槽的经验小结

1. 前言

拿到了人生中第一份工作offer!从无到有,从编程小白到数据科学。希望自己的经历能够给其他正在探索职业发展的同学们一点点启发。

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