Jeny De Figueiredo

Change of Plans

For the last few years while living in South Florida, I was building a successful Floral and Event design business.  (You can find some of my work here.)  It had been a creative dream of mine since I was in college and just when I was starting to establish myself and reaching my target customers and caliber of wedding, my husband was offered a transition to a job in Seattle with Microsoft.    While I was loving what I was doing, the work schedule of the event industry (Wednesday to Sunday) did not match up well with the rest of family’s schedule which ran a typical Monday through Friday work week.  Add to that the Seattle wedding market is the reverse of the Florida market, being slammed in the warmer months just when the family has more flexibility with their schedules.  And who would want to miss the weekends with their families in the glorious PNW?  Well, it just wasn’t making a lot of sense.   I decided if I was going to have to start over anyway, I might as well do something that matches my family’s schedule.

When in Rome

My husband went out ahead of us as the girls finished up the year of school and I finished the events that I had on the docket, sold the house, etc.  On a trip back, G was telling my oldest who wants to be an attorney, that she should really consider Data Science as there is a shortage of data scientists to wrangle with all the data that is being collected now.  She wasn’t interested.  But I said, “Whoa!  That’s a thing?  I like data!” When we got home, I went straight to the computer and found the Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science  and watched the videos about the course.  I was blown away when I watched a video of data scientists describing the type of person that’s successful in data science.  They like data, are curious, collaborative, enjoy solving problems and figuring things out; all things I love.  And opportunities abound where I was headed…

 

Well Whatta ya know?

So I began the process of taking all my courses.  While I was taking my Data Science Essentials class, I was amused and somewhat relieved at the striking similarities between the CRISP-DM (Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining) methodology for projects in analytics and the iterative process I go through when designing a wedding in my former life as a floral and event designer.  In the following graphic I take you through the steps from a generic data perspective on the left and the floral and event design process on the right… 

I could get into more detail about the similarities between the processes.  Like, for example, during Deployment, a batch processing error on the Data side is about the same as the caterer failing to put the table cloths on the reception tables at the agreed upon time, thus, in both cases, bringing all the best laid plans to an absolute and screeching halt.  But I think you can get the gist from the chart.  On to some practice…