Hi fellow data professional!

Remember when the world ended? This month, 6 years ago, the world shut down and entered “unprecedented times.”

Shortly after COVID-19 was designated a pandemic, I was unceremoniously furloughed from my day job at Disney World for 3-ish months. During COVID while others quarantined, I was on the move.

After quickly feeling isolated in our third floor Central Florida apartment, my now-wife and I joined millions of other American 20-somethings who took a pandemic as an opportunity to reclaim childhood bedrooms and spend quarantine within our family bubbles.

While Disney stopped sending checks during that time there was one line of funding open: My employer-sponsored education.

As a “sorry we fired you and left you on the streets” parting gift, Disney honored its commitment to paying for my data science master's degree.

You may be in an undergraduate or graduate program now. But let me tell you, learning data science during a once-in-a-generation pandemic hit differently.

From a news perspective, if coronavirus was the headline then data was the story.

One didn’t need to look further than another phrase everyone got sick of hearing: “Flatten the curve” to understand the role data was playing in the pandemic discourse.

Instances of data manipulation, mishandling and mislabeling abounded.

Johns Hopkins built an incredible and terrifying tracker fueled by data aggregated from local sources around the world. This, incidentally, was my first exposure to a dashboard.

For a solid year, Kaggle turned into a COVID data repository.

One of the more morbid projects I completed involved COVID data from Kaggle and scraped from Wikipedia. In the course of searching for that web data I discovered a morbidly named “Notable COVID deaths” page.

As surreal as it was to be locked in a bedroom studying while the world stopped, the post-COVID recovery was shocking.

I, along with other graduates, were fortunate enough to ride the data hiring wave, as employers flush with low-rate credit snatched up data analysts, engineers and scientists to scale infrastructure in order to take advantage of attention habits of an isolated, dopamine-dependent population.

But the start of the pandemic, during which I was more or less fired (definitely not bitter at all) mimicked the panic we’re seeing with the AI disruption.

Preemptive, fear-driven layoffs. Shareholder-endorsed, greed-fueled layoffs; *cough* Square.

The tightening of company purses. Infrastructure upended (looking at you perpetually humming data centers).

But there is some hope. Just as companies and the workforce pivoted from office set ups to remote/hybrid working arrangements, the good ones have provided workers with AI tools, training and the space to learn.

​Discover the project that inspired this trip down collective trauma lane and a reflection on the year the world paused, now 6 years later.

Thanks for ingesting,

-Zach Quinn

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