MY WORK STORY
The first work I ever really did was school work. Throughout my K through 12 years, it quickly became clear to me that I excelled at mathematics, critical thinking, and problem solving. As you'll see in the rest of this post, I've been on a long winding road, career-wise, but ultimately I came back to these original roots in my eventual choice to be a Software Engineer.
The first 'real job' I ever had was working at the CVS up the block from my high school when I was 16 years old. I started working there in May, 2003, and within a few months time, I had finished the certification process to become a Photo-Lab Technician. This is the first time in a professional setting that I was able to put my high attention to detail to good use. Beyond working the Photo-Lab, as a clerk I was also responsible for organizing and cleaning the store, balancing the cash register, and providing excellent customer service. I worked at CVS until June, 2005, when I graduated high school. Looking back on that experience makes me think that everyone should work at least one retail job in their lives, because it's a really good way to learn how to treat other people.
For the first couple of summers after I graduated from high school, I worked with a family friend, who was a plumber at J. Palin Corp., as his apprentice. This was the first experience I had with building things in a professional setting. I pretty quickly learned that I didn't want to be a plumber, but I did gain an appreciation for the subtleties required to complete a complex job correctly. It wouldn't be until later on in my career that I realized how close to my eventual chosen career I was with this job. I ultimately just needed to change from hardware to software!
After my second year of undergrad, I decided it was time to get another job, and ended up landing a gig as a Game Advisor at GameStop in July, 2007. After about 2 years there, I was promoted to being a Senior Game Advisor, where I was responsible for opening and closing the store, filing paperwork, processing incoming and outgoing deliveries, balancing the cash drawers, and again providing excellent customer service. I stayed at GameStop until April, 2011. In all honesty, this role didn't do much to nudge me toward my eventual career in Software Engineering, but I grew a lot as a person in my almost 4 years there, made some lifelong friends, and I got to indulge in one of the other great passions of life, gaming!
In April of 2011, a friend of mine was moving to DC, and asked me if I'd be interested in interviewing for the job he was leaving at a company called 'the universe knows, inc.', where he was in charge of packing and shipments. A month later, I started working there full time in his place. As a start up with only 3 employees including myself and the CEO, I was introduced to true accountability in the work place. Unlike anywhere else I had worked in the past, there was no one else to pick up any slack if something didn't get done. I very quickly got really good at organizing and owning my work. The CEOs goal for 'the universe knows, inc.' was to inspire people to follow their dreams. The hoodies, mugs, and other apparel that we sold there all had inspirational slogans designed to inspire. One day, I had an epiphany when I realized that as an employee of a company whose purpose is to inspire people, I myself did not feel inspired to continue working there. Irony, am I right!? I stayed for a few more months after that moment, because I still needed to figure out what my next move was.
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After taking some time to figure out what I wanted to do next in my life, I decided to take a Computer Science class at the local community college to see if I could see myself pursuing it as a career, and if I had an aptitude for it. Once I realized that this was something I wanted to fully pursue, I decided to find some type of work study job where I could be afforded the opportunity to study while I worked. With that in mind, I found a job as a Secretary in the clubhouse of a private gated community named The Hamlet Estates at Jericho in May, 2014. I was responsible for answering phones, signing-in guests of the clubhouse, providing excellent customer service, and opening and closing the clubhouse. As long as all of my main responsibilities were handled professionally, it was encouraged that I use my downtime to complete school work. They liked me so much that they asked me to get Red Cross certified so I could also be a life guard for the clubhouses' pool during the summer months. It was there that I gained an appreciation for the responsibility of other peoples' safety being in my hands. I worked at the Hamlet Estates while I finished my Associates Degree at Nassau Community College, my Masters Degree at Hofstra University, until July, 2017, when I ultimately landed my current role at Weill Cornell Medicine as a Research Informatics Software Engineer.
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After I finished my Masters Degree in December, 2016, while I was still working at the Hamlet Estates and I was looking for a full time job as a Software Engineer, I started working a second part-time job as a Technical Assistant back at Nassau Community College in the Computer Science Departments' Computer Lab. A professor I had at both Nassau Community College and Hofstra knew I was looking for something full time and offered me the position as a stop-gap that would keep my skills sharp. Starting in January, 2017, I was responsible for providing guidance to current students on homework and projects in a full selection of Computer Science courses including CS1, CS2, Data Structures, Mobile App Development, Computer Architecture, Assembly Language, C Programming Language, Visual Basic, and Excel. The semester ended in May, 2017, and I was welcome to come back in the fall if I hadn't found anything by then.
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That all finally brings us to my current role at Weill Cornell Medicine. Throughout that spring semester in 2017, I interviewed with several different positions at multiple companies, but nothing really seemed like a great fit. At one point in June, a recruiter reached out to me from Weill Cornell saying they wanted to interview me for a position in the Research Informatics department. After a few rounds of interviewing, I formally began in August, 2017.
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In my role as a Software Engineer for the Research Informatics department at Weill Cornell Medicine, I'm responsible for building and maintaining Extract Transform and Load (ETL) data pipelines, and architecting the overall data infrastructure of a growing amount of data that comes from a variety of large healthcare data sources. I also work with team members to convert business and technical requirements into professional software solutions, while ensuring the timely completion of tasks across multiple projects, meeting or exceeding business user expectations. To ensure the quality of my deliverables, I also create and implement in-depth testing procedures. I adhere to defined application development life-cycle practices such as requirements gathering, writing test plans, source code management, peer code review, and quality assurance through unit, system, and user acceptance testing. In order to explain my work to anyone not familiar with it (people either not on the Research Informatics team, or new members of the team), I produce and maintain comprehensive technical documentation for all systems under my responsibility.
I'm currently working primarily on backend systems, so I find that I'm mostly working with the SQL and Python programming languages, though due to my education, I'm comfortable and familiar with multiple languages, and I have little to no difficulty learning the syntax, nuances, strengths, and weaknesses of a new language. As of the writing of this post, I've been with the Research Informatics team at Weill Cornell Medicine for the better part of 5 years, which brings us up to date on my work history!
MY EDUCATION HISTORY
As far back as I can remember, I excelled at Mathematics. In 3rd grade, our class had a Math contest where the winner would get to be the president of the Math Club. I remember wanting to win so badly, because I already knew I was better at Math than everyone else in my class. The contest was basically run in spelling bee style, where each student had to answer a question, and if you got an answer wrong, you were out. The last student standing would win. I made it into the final two, and my opponent proved to actually be a fair challenge. In the end though, he finally slipped up on a problem, and I got mine right, so I was named the president! Mind you, I didn't have any real authority and we didn't really do anything as a club, but the bragging rights were enough; I was really good at Math, I knew it, and I liked it.
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I maintained an honors pace throughout my entire K-12 years, routinely getting top test scores, even above the students who would eventually go on to be Valedictorian and Salutatorian respectively. I averaged a 99 on my Sequential 1, 2, and 3 NY State Regents exams. I got a 650 on the Math section of my SAT, after forgetting my calculator. Like I said, I was good at it, and I liked being good at it.
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I also excelled at my other subjects, but not quite as much as I did in Mathematics. I was very confident in my future success, so I didn't bother to think too long or hard about what direction I actually wanted to take, and when I had meetings with guidance counselors, they expressed the same relaxed attitude. The assumption was because I was doing well in school, it would all just work out for me.
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In my freshman year of college, I originally declared as a Math Major, but after finally having a teacher that I didn't vibe with, my confidence had been shaken. I hadn't been educated enough about the actual types of jobs out there for people with my skill set, so I decided to switch my major to Economics, with a Business Minor to round it out.
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The other reason I switched out of being a Math major was that I got too caught up in making friends, and partying. I knew that I'd have to be more serious if I actually wanted to do well in my Math classes, and my mind just wasn't in a place to do that. At the time, I think I figured that I might come back to being a Math major once I had calmed down. In the meantime, I had made friends with a big group of people who, as it turned out, we're speed-solvers of the famous Rubik's Cube. I quickly became obsessed with solving the cube as quickly as possible, and trying to understand everything I can about how it worked, so as to maybe solve it faster than everyone else.
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After switching out of my Math major, I figured that Economics and Business would teach me about money, which could only be a useful thing to know about, and that I'd still get to use plenty of Math. In retrospect, I don't think I've ever hated a subject more in my life than how much I hated Economics. Everything about it bothered me to my core. I also made the mistake of taking Micro-Economics and Macro-Economics at the same time, which was a horrible idea because they had a lot of the same key words, though in one class a word would mean one thing, and in the other, it'd mean the opposite, which got really confusing. I passed all of my classes, but I knew I didn't want to pursue a career in Economics after that semester.
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It was at this point that I was pretty frustrated. I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career, and I felt like continuing school was a waste of time and money for me, so I had made the decision to drop out and take a gap year to try and figure things out. Before I had the chance though, my brother ultimately talked me out of it, saying that it would be very difficult to talk myself into going back to school once I had dropped out, and I'd be better off finishing. He happened to be pursuing film as a profession, and I had always had a passion for film making and the film industry, so I ended up declaring as a Cinema & Cultural Studies Major, along with the aforementioned Business Management Minor.
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After a few more semesters I graduated, but even as I was in school for it, some part of me knew my heart wasn't really in it. I briefly worked as a Production Assistant on NBC's The Biggest Loser, but my film career never really got going past that.
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I bounced around for a few years after finishing my Bachelors, working at GameStop and then later, the universe knows, inc., but I always felt a sense of disappointment in myself, like I had failed to hit my potential.
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Finally, in early 2013, I had what I've come to call my quarter life crisis, where I realized that feeling was dead on, and it was time to do something about it. I took a few months to decide on something, and I told myself once I did, I'd sign up for classes in it at the local community college and begin pursuing it. In those couple of months, I kept coming up with mobile app ideas. I'd have the idea, but then I'd realize I didn't have the money to hire anyone to build it, and I didn't know anything about coding, so I'd ultimately forget about it and move onto the next thing.
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After about four or five ideas like this, I finally asked myself the question that changed my life forever, "Why don't you just learn how to code, it can't be that hard, can it?" With that, I decided to learn how to code, still not at all realizing how intertwined Computer Science is with Mathematics.
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The first thing I did was find an online course that went over the basics, in javascript. I remember finishing the class and thinking to myself, "Now what?" It was at this point that I decided it was time to register for classes in Computer Science. When I looked into the program at Nassau Community College, my goal was to learn enough that I could build a mobile app. They had a mobile class, but to take it you had to finish Computer Science 1 and Computer Science 2, and you couldn't take Computer Science 2 until after you had passed Computer Science 1, so that meant I had to finish 3 full semesters in order to learn how to develop mobile applications. Since I was taking that much time, I figured I might as well just do the 4th semester and get a full Associates Degree in Computer Science. My thought at the time was, if that's not enough to help me land a job, it'll at least set me up to go and pursue a second Bachelors Degree, which would get me ready for a job as a Software Engineer.
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I'll never forget my first day of class in Computer Science 1. In order to make sure everyone belonged, my professor said,
"If you don't like computers, then you don't belong here. If you like computers, but you're bad at math, then you belong in IT, not here. If you like computers and you're good at math, then congratulations, you're in the right place."
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With that, he dove right in, and I was hooked immediately. I had always liked technology, and I had obviously always liked Math, but for some reason, I had never been shown that there was a career that so beautifully connected the two. In fact, I remember before I had figured that out that I was actually intimidated by the concept of programming. I always just thought it was super geniuses doing a thing I could never be capable of doing. But once I realized what it actually was, I was very excited to realize that not only did I already have the natural aptitude to be a programmer, but I was going to excel at it.
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Those two years at Nassau Community College go down as arguably the best two of my life. I loved the material that was covered, had great professors who would take the time out to help you with a problem when you ran into one, loved hanging out in the computer lab to do assignments, and made life long friends who went through the same grind as me.
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I signed up for the Math and Computer Club, and after a semester, I ran for president for it and won.
While I was the president of the Math and Computer Club, I read about a contest hosted by this company called Ardusat (now called Because Learning), where they wanted students to propose ideas for an experiment to be run on a satellite they controlled in Earths orbit. If your proposal was one of the 15 winners to get picked, they'd let you actually run your experiment on their satellite in space. We had a day in the Math and Computer Club where everyone pitched ideas for experiments, and in the end, we ended up voting on my idea, which was to use the satellite to measure the color and temperature radiating off of the Earth's surface, and see if using Wien's Law, we could predict the temperature of Earth's surface.
Anyone that knows Wien's Law understands that the law applies to black-bodies that produce their own light, like stars, and not planets that reflect the light from other sources off of it. I figured that despite that, it would be an interesting experiment because it utilized most of the sensors the satellite had to use, and it would be interesting to see if maybe there is some correlation. It turns out my hunch that they were looking for experiments that utilized as many sensors as possible was right, because we were one of the 15 proposals chosen.
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The actual process of getting the data back from Ardusat was messy and ultimately not what I had hoped for. First, they mis-scheduled the time for our run, so to placate us, they ran the experiment on a weather balloon rather than on their satellite. As the weather balloon really only stayed in one area, the results were inconclusive from that first experiment. Then, eventually, we finally got to run our experiment on the actual satellite, but it turned out that the sensor on the satellite that I was hoping measured lights wavelength (color), was actually a luminosity sensor (brightness), so we again weren't able to draw any interesting results.
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I'd say that it was my first real experience in science though. Sometimes, the result you get isn't the result you want, but that's the scientific process! Also, despite everything, it was very, very cool to write code that actually ran off-world.
It was sometime during my tenure as president of the Math and Computer Club that the story of mathematicians solving God's Number for the 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube came onto my radar (for those that don't know, God's Number references the most amount of moves you'd ever need to solve a Rubik's Cube, even in the worst, most mixed up case, given an optimal solving algorithm). The authors of that paper published their findings in 2010, but I happened to re-discover this finding while in the Math & Computer Club. When I read the article that described what I did for the Math and Computer Club, we discussed it for a bit, and that discussion got me thinking about the problem some more.
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I came to the realization that there was more to solve than simply what that number was. I wanted to understand why the solution they found was what it was. They had simply brute forced the problem, which is a Computer Science term for trying every single possibility, and then reporting back your results. It struck me as Mathematically lazy.
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As I was getting ready to graduate, and thinking about other schools to pursue a second Bachelors degree in, one of my professors convinced me to instead go straight for a Masters degree. Honestly, I hadn't realized that was even a possibility for me until after I had a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, but the truth was that because of all of the pre requisites I had taken while pursing my Associates in Computer Science, and the fact that I did actually have a Bachelors degree already, I qualified to get into grad school. As it turned out, the program I signed up for took less time than it would have taken to even get that second Bachelors degree.
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I applied to Hofstra University on the recommendation of that same professor who also taught at Hofstra, got accepted, and started classes in the Fall of 2015. In the spring, when it came time to consider whether to pursue a final project, or a thesis project, I knew I wanted to do a thesis, and I knew exactly what I wanted to study, the Rubik's Cube.
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Basically, I wanted to try and figure out God's Number by reverse engineering the original authors' process. Rather than try and solve every cube state, and then see the most amount of moves they'd need to solve any one of them, I figured it might make more sense to start with a solved cube, and apply every possibility of move sequences to it, and collect data about the results with the hope that that data might shine more light on the problem. You can read the full thesis here.
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I ended up finishing my program in 3 semesters (plus 2 summer courses), graduating in December 2016 with a Masters Degree in Computer Science from Hofstra University. A few months later, I started my career as a Software Engineer! It took me a long time to truly find my calling, and I learned a lot of different things, both about the world, and about myself, along the way.