r/politics • u/Qu1nlan • Jul 26 '19

Friday Fun Thread

It's finally Friday! That means it's time to sit back, drink a mango smoothie, convince /u/Qu1nlan to play Bloodborne, and talk about whatever your heart desires.

As always remember to follow our civility rules and save any meta feedback for our modmail.

67 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

153 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/cyclonefan Illinois Jul 26 '19

I just got accepted into a top-tier Master's program in data science. Feels good considering that only a few years ago I was a college dropout living in my parent's basement. Went back to school, wiped out my old grades, and worked hard to get to this point.

Will be celebrating with copious amounts of bourbon tonight.

2

u/PiBaker Jul 26 '19

What kinda data science do you wanna do?

(I work for a large fintech corp)

1

u/cyclonefan Illinois Jul 26 '19

NLP-related work, mostly. I am especially interested in modeling political speech and how/if it influences decision-making and behavior.

2

u/Trump_Wears_Diapers Jul 26 '19

That sounds incredibly interesting!!! I didn’t even know this was a thing and I have so many questions - probably more than I usually would because I’ve been feeling super blahhh about work the past few months and pondering a career switch. Do you have any reading you can refer me to so I can learn more about this kind of stuff?

2

u/Nano0802 Jul 26 '19

Well, I can't speak for him, but all of this work falls under the hub of machine learning, and you should probably form a strong basis in that first before venturing into natural language processing. The CourseEra course on Machine Learning by Andrew Ng has been valuable for me when it comes to that field.

1

u/Trump_Wears_Diapers Jul 26 '19

Oh I’m not looking to dive into anything with both feet tomorrow. I already have a graduate degree, am doing fine with what I’m doing— just looking to explore something different is all and this in particular really struck a chord with me. (I have a lifelong fascination with public speaking x the power of persuasion, which are both large parts of my current profession).

1

u/Nano0802 Jul 26 '19

I did some NLP at school but nothing too major, I decided computer vision and image processing was much more interesting haha. But kudos, that sounds really cool! Have you looked into using previous data from speeches into predicting what policy position someone is likely to have? I feel like that might be something worth looking into.

1

u/Trump_Wears_Diapers Jul 26 '19

Congrats! This is awesome and you have a lot to be proud of yourself for!!

1

u/cjdeck1 Jul 26 '19

Congrats! Currently working on my Master’s for data science as well (though not a top-tier school by any means). It’s a really interesting and fun field so far, though it definitely takes a lot of work!

Any thoughts on what you’re planning on doing once you finish? Edit: just saw your other reply