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Blog #8 - Final Reflection

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    Looking back on my three weeks with Ben at Vertical Knowledge, I can say with certainty that my Hawken Project exceeded any sort of expectations that I had going in. I pursued this project purely due to my love of mathematics and my newfound interest in statistics, and I ended up learning many new skills and having a lot of fun along the way.     My original hope for the project was to " engage in an impactful project that [would] give me a better idea of my future career plans, as well as to see the kinds of skills required to work in this field." I would argue that the latter part of that statement was precisely what went well over the past three weeks. I got to see first-hand the kind of coding experience and data-related expertise that is necessary to obtain a job in a data science/statistical career. Although I came in with virtually no prior knowledge about the particularities of this occupation, Ben did an exceptional job bringing me up to speed. He starte...
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Blog #7 - Day 14

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    As it turns out, Day 14 was my last day in-person at Vertical Knowledge. With Ben having a busy day on Day 15 and little left for me to do in the office, I will be using Day 15 to begin figuring out how I will present my experience to my peers and teachers.      So...Day 14 - what a day it was! I started off by helping Ben check over a dataset for a client. This particular Excel sheet contained information about all hospitals in the country that use the Da Vinci Surgical System. The data was extracted from the Da Vinci website using a web crawler, so all that was left for Ben and me to do was look up several zip codes across the United States and make sure that the hospitals we found matched the information in the Excel file. I checked hospitals in New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Alaska, and Wyoming, and once I was certain enough that all the data in the spreadsheet was correct, he exported the file to the client.      After that, I ret...
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Blog #6 - Days 11-13

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    Day 11 was a bit of a wash, due to the fact that I had another baseball game in Copley that afternoon, so I was left with no choice but to work from home. As a result, I continued thinking over some of the tasks Alex and Ben had given me in the previous days relating to RV Trader data and brainstorming possible ways to accomplish them with the new skills that I developed.     Consequently, Days 12 and 13 were very busy days.  These past couple of weeks, two of the main areas of focus of my senior project have been improving my Python coding skills and familiarizing myself with the data visualization platform, Tableau. Thus, in the last two days, I recommenced my work in both of these fields as Ben and I started to think about how I would present my Hawken Project.     Seeing as my two-week Tableau free trial was set to expire at the end of Day 12, I started off by constructing a dashboard in Tableau using RV Trader data from the past four quarters....
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Blog #5 - Days 9 & 10

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      Days 9 and 10 both sort of felt like the culmination of a lot of hard work and commitment, but for two very different reasons.      On Day 9, I actually did not go into "work" (as I have come to call it), as I had a district semi-final baseball game at Copley High School at two o'clock. Thus, it didn't make sense for me to go to Hawken Project, only to leave an hour later. Still, our baseball team worked hard to get to that point, and so I figured it was worth mentioning in the blog.     Anyways, back to the more important matters.     Day 10 was a good day, starting with the fact that seemingly everybody in the office (all six of them!) said something along the lines of "It's gonna be a good day!" within the first hour of my arrival. After setting up my laptop and my monitor (I have two screens now! -- I feel like a professional), I joined Ben and Alex in Ben's office for a meeting with the QA team. It was the typical "What are yo...
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Blog #4 - Days 6-8

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      I don't have many regrets about my high school experience, but something that I do wish I had done differently was taken a few coding classes during my time at Hawken. Given that I am probably looking to go into a statistics-related field when I graduate college, it would have been very useful for me to learn some of the most popular programming languages to prepare me for my future career. But alas, I shied away from any such courses, and, as a result, I will have to start with the basics of data science when I step foot on campus next fall.     That being said, I previously recounted how last week, one of Ben's genius co-workers named Alex tried to teach me the basics of Python. Although I was very confused for the majority of the "lesson," I was starting to understand the language at its most elementary level. There was only one problem...just as I was beginning to pick it up, Alex went on vacation.      So...this past week, I have been w...
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Blog #3 - Days 4 & 5

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    These past two days at Vertical Knowledge have been quite interesting, not only because I am continuing to learn new things, but because I have witnessed how a small mishap in data collection can bring about considerable consequences for those involved.    Vertical Knowledge recently became aware that two of their clients either did not receive the kind of data that they were paying for or they got it at the wrong frequency. The problem lay in the coding of the web crawlers (or as they call them, "spiders"), which collect the data from specific websites and export it on a particular day. This may not seem like a big deal, but when a company receives data that was not meant to go to them, it calls into question the entire process and whether they can trust that the data they are paying for is not being sent to other clients on accident. That would decrease the value of the information that they have purchased and therefore cause the client to lose money.  ...
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Blog #2 - Days 1-3

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       I have spent the past three days at Vertical Knowledge learning the basics of data analysis.     On Day 1, Ben sent over a huge spreadsheet of data on Microsoft Excel detailing all the vehicle listings on a website called RV Trader. This is one of the hundreds of websites/companies from which his company collects public data, and Ben wanted me to start off by figuring out how to find values such as the number of RV listings and average price by condition, make, region, etc. By the end of the day, I had learned how to use both formula calculations and pivot tables in Microsoft Excel in order to obtain the information I needed.     Day 2 was an information-packed day because Ben had several meetings to go to, so I started off the day by learning a new function in Excel called "vlookup," which basically allows you to locate a value in a table given a particular input (pretty useful!). Then, he paired me up with one of his coworkers named Alex....
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