[Student Profile]
[Prompt & Essay]
Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a
new understanding of yourself or others.
As I reviewed my list of players, verifying that I had correctly typed each player’s team and
statistics, my friends and I joked about Nathan Peterman’s abysmal performance from the previous season. While we continued to select players for our fantasy football teams, I grew increasingly aware that Chris Godwin was falling, pick by pick. Excited by the potential value I could get due to his potential increase in playing time, I weighed the risk of picking him, versus another player, and the possibility of losing the opportunity. Finally, in a decision I would not regret, I selected him in the sixth round, cementing the driving force behind a team that reached the finals.
Data science is a driving force behind fantasy football: a variety of team and individual factors result in particular player performance. However, data science is more than a way to beat my friends at fantasy football; it can also provide meaningful, life-saving information in multiple fields. I experienced this personally when I applied data science to cardiology at an internship I sought to honor my grandfather’s memory. When my grandfather was born, it was discovered that he had a severe heart condition: one of his valves was malfunctioning.
By replacing this faulty valve with a metal one, a surgeon saved his life but likely ended up taking multiple years off the end of his life due to further issues that replacement caused. Watching his heartbreaking inability to squeeze a stress ball as he aged, a result of complications with heart issues, I began to fear for his life. Years after he passed, I was finally able to contribute to future cardiology treatments. On my first day at the lab, a presentation littered with hundreds of cardiac terms left me feeling overwhelmed, believing that I had entered a whole new field of science unrelated to anything I had learned before. This was like picking between 500 different players in fantasy football but in a far more important task. However, the memory of my grandfather propelled me to learn more about the causes of heart disease. While reviewing a paper on the implementation of the Luo-Rudy model, I learned of the effects of biological variables on the heart, including sodium and potassium currents, efflux and influx of ions, and changes in voltage as a result of injected currents.
At first, I was baffled, but eventually, I realized that the interactions between these variables weren’t so different from the lists of player stats that I was used to maneuvering in fantasy football. Each served a purpose, which, when combined, produced a greater whole. By viewing each cardiac action as a computer science function, I began to understand their mechanisms better, breaking each piece of the heart into a separate “algorithm” of sorts. With this cardiac data science project, I realized that I had made a discovery to potentially help individuals like my grandfather. My data science experiences allow me to continue to improve at fantasy football as I become more in tune with the strategy in fun topics. I’m also able to further my understanding of cardiology by viewing it as a group of variables rather than a mess of difficult-to-understand medical terms. While my interest in data science began as a hobby, I now see that it is much more than just something that can be used for fun, but an endlessly applicable medium that can be used toward achieving a goal, whether that be in economics, medicine, or sports. It often feels like I’ve achieved the unachievable, as if I’m part of science-fiction, but this is reality.