So I thought I’d borrow a million words
together to say goodbye one more time
from sounds and stories I love and a man… I dislike.
Cause words might have many lenders and owners
but all their lone lenders own them a loan,
and whereas they’re their owners… none is owned.
Adiós.
I wanted to be a scientist ever since I read a comic where scientist Bruce Banner turns into The Incredible Hulk. I did not know what a scientist was or what kind of scientist I wanted to be, yet, I thought that the scientific career sounded like lots of fun if it can turn you up into a huge green monster.
I guess that for children of my age back in those days Marvel comics were the closest thing to Harry Potter for children nowadays (Let’s get ready for a massive turn up of sorcerers and witches in the coming years by the way).
So there I am after a few years since I read the comic and for reasons beyond this post but that can easily be described like a billiard break(ing bad) I end up with a couple of degrees; Computer Science and Statistics, and a Master in Operation Research (more of the same stuff).
Yet, I never considered myself (nor did anyone else) as a scientist or a researcher since, well… when programming I don’t feel much like doing science no matter how big the word science is in my Computer Science degree, and the degree in Statistics does not make me feel like an scientist either nor the Master like a researcher.
Statistics by themselves are just a field of mathematics and mathematicians are more into precise grammar than into writing beautiful books. Not to mention the opinion of physicists like Feynman about the current use of statistics for science that downgrades Social Sciences and other fields into Pseudo-Science.
There was a time when some of the work I was doing could be named as Data Mining and this seemed to push me further and further away from my childhood dream since now I could be considered a Miner instead of a Scientist… Don’t get me wrong, Miner is no a bad profession if you want to start a revolution but all the glamour of the word science was gone and so my dream to be a scientist darkened with soot.
But then… Data Science came along, wait, what? That’s right! Data Science is what you get when we consider every procedure that brings us knowledge stripped of any field background, the intersection of every science known to men, the Mixed Martial Arts of knowledge. Data Science… if you think about it, can there be any other kind of science?
Not surprisingly when meeting with fellow Data Scientists we’ll find out they come from all sort of venues and that data science teams are usually Macedonian salads of scientific backgrounds which include Physicists (of course) and Musicians (you heard me).
So turns out that after so many years my dream came true and I became exactly what I wished back in those days: a Scientist with no particular field… but data, and since everything is data, now everything is my field. So I can finally proudly say “Scientist at last, Scientist at last, thanks God almighty I’m a Scientist at last!”.
And now if you excuse me I have to go back to my scientific project codenamed Green. Thank you very much.
