Getting situated in NYC and TidyTuesday

After quite the hectic week, which started with a three-day road trip from Dallas to New York City, I’ve finally managed to settle into New York City (only to hear about a guy getting shot outside my Airbnb 30 minutes before I was leaving for work on the first day). The biggest difference compared to anywhere else I’ve lived seems to be the commute time. A 30-minute commute (to any place, not just work) seems to be a minimum, which is in stark contrast to basically a 30-minute maximum commute in Pittsburgh.

Now, to talk a bit more about what this website and blog will consist of. TidyTuesday (ideally, you can see a link to it at the top) is the blog series that prompted my original idea for starting a blog. TidyTuesday is actually a weekly data publication by the R4DS Online Learning Community, where they publish a raw dataset in a “tame” format that makes it easy to work with. Writing my senior thesis made me realize how difficult it was to write about data in the way I wanted: painting a very clear story with each model or visualization contributing to that well-depicted narrative in a meaningful manner. I realized that I needed a lot more practice before I got to the level I wanted to be at, and so this blog series is exactly that: practice. That, coupled with the fact that I intend on learning a lot more ML and econometrics, makes this seem like the perfect thing to do so that the next time I write a full-fledged paper, I can actually write as fluidly as I want to.