Bio
Education
A.B., Political Science (2007), Davidson College
About Me
Well, as mentioned on the Home page, I’m a professor of the practice1 in Data Science at Davidson College, where I also earned my degree. I took a meandering path to get here. My twenties featured notable career accolades like being a law school dropout, losing my job and living on unemployment for several months during the Great Recession, and even two painful, sleep-deprived stints at the United States Marine Corps Officer Candidates School (OCS)2 in Quantico, Virginia. I used to think I was cursed, until one day I landed in a corporate job that I thought would go nowhere, but actually changed my life forever.
That job introduced me to working with data, specifically through programming and data visualization. And from that point on, I was hooked. And I was pretty successful at it, progressing from being a junior analyst to a manager to a director all in the span of less than four years. But then I got really tired of managing people and took a job at Davidson as a developer in the IT department. It was a welcome change of pace from the corporate world, and it eventually led me to my dream job, the one I have now, teaching data science at my alma mater.
Fly-fishing
I picked up the art of fly-fishing from my dad in my senior year of college. So far, I have fly-fished all over North Carolina, parts of Tennessee and Virginia, as well as Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Washington. I tried to fish on Isle of Skye, Scotland, but a huge storm blew through and I had to cancel the trip because it is literally impossible to cast a fly rod when you’re facing 50mph wind gusts.
I’m probably an average angler at best. I go a few times a year, which is not nearly enough to satisfy my love of the sport, but it’s incredibly restorative when I find time for it. The solitude of being in the Appalachians and communing with nature is a spiritual experience for me, even if I don’t catch a single fish.
Skiing
Downhill skiing is my wife’s passion, and she used to work as a ski instructor when she lived in Colorado. She re-introduced me to the sport after we got married, and since then we’ve skied mostly in Banff and Steamboat Springs. At some point, she says she’ll take me to Park City and Big Sky, which are probably her two favorite places to hit the powder.
I love to ski, but I’m not terribly good at it. I pretty much just stick to the blue runs when we go out west.
Travels
My wife and I are homebodies most of the time, no doubt about it, but occasionally we love to travel. As a student, I had the good fortune to study overseas at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where I focused on political philosophy and literature. In my senior year, I also got to participate in an awesome political science research trip to Colombia. Both of these experiences gave me the travel bug, so we try to do a big international trip every few years if we can.
Isle of Skye 2022
Ireland 2024
Footnotes
If you’re not familiar with the term, “professors of the practice” are faculty who are appointed to teach based on their professional experience rather than any scholarly achievements, which describes me perfectly because I have no scholarly achievements. 😁↩︎
One of the coolest experiences I ever had, minus the part where they shaved my head, and minus the part where I got injured during training and they had to discharge me from the program.↩︎