A JOURNEY SO FAR TRAVELLED
As a child while still in Uganda, my parents used to tell me that they cannot give me money, they cannot give land nor any kind of property but they could give me an education. These are the words that stuck with me from the time I was in kindergarten. My father unemployed, a volunteer at the local church in our home district used to get money for our tuition, my brother and I through soliciting for church donations from people and fundraising. My mother on the other hand used to grow corn behind our house and she used to sell off the surplus to get money to contribute to home groceries, water, electricity bills and rent. This greatly pushed me to be the student I am today, because I looked back at home and new that I was their hope, light and inspiration. I knew that I had to make it to keep our family going and to sustain it. I am a first-generation student and none of my parents made in to college because of tribalism and poverty in the early 1990’s. Having this opportunity to be in college is a blessing and I am grateful for it, my parents’ guidance, determination and love for education enabled me to make it to college, they guided me in every possible step and still do.
Being a better version of myself and being a good student interests me, being a data scientist one day too. I enjoy working on and talking about business analysis, I want to use my data science skills to help companies make strategic decisions in their sales and products here in the United States and possibly back home in Uganda too. I hope to put my degree to use through this kind of work, I am also thinking about building an algorithm to help with climate change that will help humanity make good decisions now for the future.
Statistics and my foundations of data science classes come easiest for me, I am a mathematics and statistics person, solving problems and coming up with solutions is satisfying to me and makes my day, it keeps me doing what I am doing above and beyond. It is because of this that I have engaged in research in statistics with my professor in the Fall 2023 semester. With this research, I looked at coming up with visualized data about the diversity of STEM faculty here at University of Mary Washington. The research helped me to get a hands on experience with dealing with a data set , coming up with conclusions, insights and graphical representations of my findings in forms of pie charts, bar graphs, chord diagrams, line graphs and heat maps. To share further more, in my research, I found out that there are more white faculty on campus compared to any other race.
I intend to major in Data science and minor in applied statistic. Small businesses in my home country Uganda pushed me to pursue data science and to hopefully become a data scientist who will help businesses through business analysis. I grew up seeing how businesses in my home country were run and the people there needed help with making good business decisions, knowing the season when to sell what, knowing how much to produce and the minimum wage to give to workers, these are things that small businesses back home struggled with. They had no business training nor entrepreneurial skills of any sort, with the guidance and mentorship of my professor Stephen Davies, I got to know about the data science major and dived in it to see what it had to offer. With this skill set, I hope to become a business analyst or do some work with the government to help with climate change.
One step at a time, one foot in front of the other, I will make it one day.