This week marks the one-year anniversary of the inaugural session of the Seattle Insight Data Science program. Time flies, and these rockstar Fellows have taken off. Every single Fellow from this first cohort is currently employed as a Data Scientist in industry!

Seattle is one of the fastest growing cities in the US for tech jobs, and the data community is no exception. Companies like Airbnb, Ebay, Google, Lyft and Facebook have all launched Seattle offices and continue to grow their Seattle data presence. At Insight, data leaders from local companies like these met with and exposed Fellows to the wide diversity of Seattle’s data landscape. Better understanding of the local scene and roles enabled Fellows to find their perfect fit among this tight-knit community.

Through the Seattle program, Fellows worked on self-directed data products (e.g., Crash Catcher), while receiving extensive mentorship from the vast Insight alumni network and the Insight team. Their projects and guided preparation helped Fellows not only land their dream jobs, but enabled them to hit the ground running once on the job.

1 Year Later: Where they are now?

Allison and Jide whiteboarding in preparation for Data Science interviews.

Allison

Allison was a Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington eScience Institute, where she modeled ecological and climate patterns for marine ecosystems.

As an Insight Fellow, Allison built a product to distinguish which photos would become popular on social media. She used a number of computer vision algorithms, including Google Cloud vision and Python’s Imaging library, to extract and create features for images and then ran them through a random forest classifier.

Allison is now a Data Scientist at Convoy, a company that uses data science and machine learning to revolutionize the trucking industry.

Mengyuan

Mengyuan came from a bioengineering background at the University of Washington; for her PhD, she developed computer vision and machine learning models to automate medical imaging analyses.

Mengyuan explaining her consulting data project at Fred Hutch.

For her project, Mengyuan built the core product for an early stage startup. Her algorithm used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to assess how likely Instagram users were to purchase advertised products based on their comments.

Now, a data scientist for SAP Concur, Mengyuan uses her background in computer vision and the NLP skills she developed at Insight, to create solutions for automated expense recognition and audits for businesses.

Shay

Shay received his doctorate from Harvard, where as a neuroscientist, he modeled mouse behavior, inspired by the multi-armed bandit problem in reinforcement learning theory.

At Insight, he designed a predictive pricing strategy tool for musicians to optimize their revenue through online sales. With data he scraped from Bandcamp, he identified artists with similar customer bases through collaborative filtering; then predicted indie sales using a random forest classifier.

Shay and Alan preparing for interviews at Insight.”

As a Senior Data Scientist at LiveStories, he now works to build state-of-the-art data solutions that promote data literacy and positively impact public health.

Nikhil

Nikhil formerly worked as a D3.js O’Reilly course developer and instructor, programmer, analyst and scientist at major biotechnology companies such as Affymetrix and Illumina. He earned his PhD at the University of Washington, where he developed quantitative models for visual perception of large biological networks.

Nikhil presenting to local Madrona Venture startups, like Rover.

For his Insight project, Nikhil built a web app that identifies content in videos using recurrent neural networks and recommended songs to match. In his algorithm, he used Natural Language Processing for topic extraction to match the word description of videos to songs from Spotify.

When discussing his time as Insight, Nikhil said “At Insight, I had the opportunity to practice essential data science skills, and learn about concepts to which I had little exposure. Aside from reinforcing my machine learning and statistics skills, I learned about SQL, developed business acumen, and practiced communicating complex technical information in easily digestible ways. I use all of these skills daily at Microsoft.”

On Microsoft’s Azure team, Nikhil now works as a Data and Applied Scientist, using NLP to build predictive and explanatory models that drive business decisions.

1 Year Later: Where are we now?

Our Seattle Insight community has grown to over 80 alumni working in Data Science, Data Engineering, Health Data and AI across 40 different companies. These include Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, AirBnB, KPMG, Uber, Zillow, Concur and Indeed; and startups like iSpot.tv, Convoy, Zymergen, RealSelf and Stylyze.

Even after the Insight Fellowship ends, alumni continue to meet up on a regular basis to keep up to date on local data tools and technologies, share best practices and good times. From Data Meetups, Lightning Chats, happy hours, volunteering, outdoor trekking to picnics in the park, our alumni continue to learn from and support each other throughout their entire careers.