A story told at the campfire
Data Science Society
The Data Science Society runs real consulting engagements: actual clients, actual deadlines, actual consequences when the model is wrong. I started as a data science consultant building end-to-end solutions for clients, and now serve as technical project manager: sourcing projects, scoping them into something a student team can ship in a semester, coordinating the teams, and keeping client communication honest about what’s possible.
Scoping is the underrated skill. Clients arrive with a vague wish (“use AI on our data”), and the job is translating that into a concrete problem with measurable success criteria before anyone writes a line of code. Getting that translation right is the difference between a team that ships and a team that thrashes.
On the research side of the society, I’m also implementing diffusion steering via reinforcement learning to improve text-in-image generation. It’s the kind of problem I’d never meet in consulting, which is exactly why it’s worth doing.