Conference Video: Kate Hertweck, PhD Workshop - More than code: Professional assets in data science careers
This is the video of Kate Hertweck, PhD’s talk from the WiDS Puget Sound Conference 2020. Enjoy!
ABSTRACT:
In a field like data science, it’s easy to focus on technical skills: lines of code, programming languages, algorithms, and data types. While it’s important to have proficiency at tasks related to these skills, it’s often other attributes that enable job satisfaction and advancement. This workshop focuses on identifying and developing these non-technical skills, such as communication, adaptabillity, and project management. These skills may represent previous educational and career achievements you can easily identify, like training in a specific scientific domain or experience as a manager. Other skills may be hidden and not as straightforward to articulate, such as planning and organizational capacity. We’ll use break-out groups and facilitated discussion to assess the skills you possess and those you’d like to develop, and help you connect them to your specific career goals. You’ll leave this workshop able to articulate the assests you already possess that complement your technical skills, as well as a plan to help you develop other non-technical skills that can aid in your career progression.
Kate Hertweck is the bioinformatics training manager at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where they lead development and implementation of courses on reproducible computational methods through fredhutch.io and facilitate collaborative communities of practice through the Coop. Kate’s graduate training at University of Missouri in genomic evolution of plants was followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) at Duke University, where they began working exclusively in computational biology. Kate then spent four years as an assistant professor teaching bioinformatics, genomics, and plant taxonomy before transitioning to biomedical research training. Kate has been involved in The Carpentries, a non-profit organization that teaches reproducible computational methods, since 2014, serving as a leader in community governance as well as instructor trainer. When not being an overenthusiastic instructor, Kate likes to spend her time doing fiber arts (knitting, crochet) and enjoying all things science fiction.