{"id":1123,"date":"2016-08-08T05:08:26","date_gmt":"2016-08-08T05:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/personal-statement-rmit-2016"},"modified":"2019-08-06T10:22:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T10:22:49","slug":"personal-statement-rmit-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2016\/08\/08\/personal-statement-rmit-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Personal Statement RMIT 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

To whom it may concern,<\/p>\n

A personal statement is not mandatory for my application to a Masters in Analytics but is an opportunity for me to advertise my interest and relevant experience. This letter will comprise a quasi-biographical form since that is the easiest medium for expressing and communicating my position.<\/p>\n

I have a background in biomedical science (completed with an Honours year in 2008, and going to begin but not finish a PhD in the fields of cell signalling and neurodegeneration). Illness interrupted my studies, which planted the seeds for apathy and depression. I skip this part of the story.<\/p>\n

I began reinvigorating myself with a purpose in 2015, and by November of that year decided that whatever I would want to do, it would have to involve computers. Being unfamiliar with programming, yet enamoured by the obvious potential of iterative processes, I began a quest for self-study.<\/p>\n

This auto-didactic curriculum has thoroughly meandered, but as I learned more I honed my focus, until such time as I knew without a doubt that my passion lay in data science.<\/p>\n

I am passionate about my potential for learning data science, and in time applying those skills in the domains of biological research.<\/p>\n

This brings me to the current day. In order to indicate a sense of my journey over the last 5 months, I have attempted a summary (necessarily incomplete) of areas of study, and resources of inspiration.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Learning python fundamentals \u2013 Codacademy and Learn Python the Hard Way <\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Producing a card war game utilizing Pygame (GUI) and a message queue system \u2013 by way of The Python Game Book, Foundations in Python Networking<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. Learning to implement web frameworks (Flask), deployment (Heroku), and SQL (Flask-Alchemy, Postgres) \u2013 by way of multiple web resources, including those by Miguel Grinberg<\/li>\n
  4. Many Pycon (python conference and workshop) talks available on youtube<\/li>\n
  5. Learning R fundamentals \u2013 Cousera courses The Data Scientists Toolbox <\/em>and R Programming<\/em> and Getting and Cleaning Data<\/em>, and the book R Programming for Data Science <\/em>by Peng<\/li>\n
  6. Refamiliarizing myself with maths by way of Khan Academy, working through their \u201cmissions\u201d on trigonometry, pre-calculus, differential calculus, and integral calculus<\/li>\n
  7. Inspiring myself with a handful of podcasts that discuss data science and machine learning<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It is difficult to communicate an impression, but I hope that I have given you a sense of my journey, purpose, and sense of discovery, and thus also of my passion.<\/p>\n

    Yours sincerely,<\/p>\n

    Shai Marom<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    To whom it may concern, A personal statement is not mandatory for my application to a Masters in Analytics but is an opportunity for me to advertise my interest and relevant experience. This letter will comprise a quasi-biographical form since that is the easiest medium for expressing and communicating my position. I have a background […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[159,134,232,154],"tags":[],"metadata":[],"class_list":["post-1123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-all-posts","category-autodidactic","category-curriculum-vitae","category-google-drive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":661,"url":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2016\/05\/19\/first-impressions-of-r\/","url_meta":{"origin":1123,"position":0},"title":"First impressions of R","author":"Pala","date":"May 19, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I've only been studying R[I] for a few weeks. 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