My name is David Cruz. I’m a Data Scientist. This “About Me” page is meant to give a good history of who I am as a person, my background, and what’s going on in my life. Explore my portfolio for writings about my professional projects, experiences, and insights.
My History
I was born during the baby years of the internet(1993!) in Queens, New York. My parents migrated to this country with entrepreneurial spirits; full of ambition and determination to make better lives for themselves and their kids. Early on in grade school, I was among the top performing students, receiving straight A’s with very, very rare B+ throughout elementary school. This early signal of academic proficiency was recognized and I was placed into honors classes beginning with my transfer into middle school.
Life holds precious moments and hard times for everybody, and I’m no exception. Entering middle school, a big mixture of changes took place which effected my academic trajectory negatively. My social life prospered, but my school responsibilities were ignored. Throughout middle school and high school, I steadily declined in my academic performance, replacing my time spent learning about math and science with time spent learning about games, sports, and friends. By the 9th grade I was fully out of honors programs, and by graduating year I was barely scraping by to graduate on time. By the end of my teenage years, I had turned into a libertine youth. Literally, my xbox gamertag was ‘Liberator’ and that pseudoname (and variations of it) followed me throughout every gaming network I joined.
I stopped attending my community college after receiving failing grades in my first and second semester. My excuses sounded like “the time spent learning could be spent earning a wage on the clock” or “the irrelevance of the material being taught to me is a total waste of time.” at this point, my attitude towards life was not about long-term planning at all, and I was much happier focusing on immediate paychecks, relationships, and immediate gratification.
From my late teens into my mid twenties, I spent my time absorbing knowledge from many different businesses. I worked in a variety of industries across different positions, each of them contributing to my own ever-growing melting-pot of best practices and ideologies, from flipping burgers to being a fully registered Financial Advisor through the SEC and FINRA. Because of the incentive of payments raises and commissions, the idea of working my way up through corporate america was the exact opposite of the idea of working through the american college system to me. In college, I would have to spend my time, spend my money, and receive nothing but a pat on the back and a piece of paper which validates my knowledge. Through work, I could still learn more directly applicable skills, develop connections and networks, and most importantly, receive compensation for my efforts. Every full-time job I’ve ever held, I was an overtime worker, a dedicated employee with a keen mind and a commitment to do above-par work. I had come a long way, only to still feel unsatisfied and searching for fulfillment. I found that fulfillment through computers.
Coding and computer programming became a hobby to me at some point in my twenties. I began building demo micro-video games using the Unity game engine for fun, and I completed a couple of free courses on Google’s Codecadamy to learn basic python and C++. Over time, my passion for coding remained intact, but I would always keep this work ‘on the back-burner’ so that I could focus on more life-impacting events and activities. I always planned to eventually make a shift into computer engineering and programming, but ‘taking the dive’ was a truly frightening idea, and so I lived onwards with my full-time jobs. That is, until the pandemic of 2020. Corona shut everything down in New York overnight, which effectively rendered me jobless and imposed a feeling of stagnation upon me. In mid-march, nobody was allowed out of their homes for any reason unless it was to replenish resources. This hit me hard. I hit rock bottom fast. I wasn’t so much depressed as I was feeling absolutely frustrated and defeated. My employer originally placed me on “furlough”, a status which I knew would be quickly replaced with ‘laid off’ (and it was!) Thankfully, the government activated an assistance plan for those affected by the pandemic, and I was provided with the financial safety I needed to take my next step. For many, this time was supposed to be for ‘rest” and “self-reflection”. For me, this was the opportunity of my life, and I knew that I had to take immediate action.
No more than two days after losing my job, I found a link to enroll in Lambda School, an online bootcamp offering a full-time curriculum in multiple different specializations of software engineering and data science. I fell in love after taking the pre-course work. I knew that the skills gained were not only valuable, but I knew that I had always had kept a passive interest in analytics and insights. The idea of using my strength in analytics to help people was inspiring and motivation for me to succeed. It was time for me to activate my passion. The material wasn’t easy by any means, but I grasped the concepts and passed their onboarding exam in time to be enrolled in the Full-Time cohort beginning in April of 2020. This has been one of the most positive, impactful, and life-changing decisions that I have made. I have made countless valuable connections, I’ve learned in depth concepts and I’ve successfully applied them in multiple solo and cross-functional projects. I graduated from their Data Science andd Machine Learning Program in October of 2020. In the following ending months of the year, I worked for the school as a technical project lead, where I helped guide students through the collaborative process of working on a cross-functional team. During this time I also juggled a determined and focused job search.
Fast-forward to May of 2021. The world is changing around us. If Co-vid 19 were lemons, me becoming a Data Scientist was my way of making lemonade. I love everything about the industry that I’m in. I love discovering, researching, creating, improving, fixing , and working on projects with renewed energy every day. I’m currently a Junior Data Scientist Apprentice under IBM’s Data Science Elite team, where I’m taking the amazing opportunity to work on real-world problems with world-leading experts in the field. I’ll work to share some success stories from my team on this blog, as well as my personal projects. Thank you for reading this!