I'm a learner.
I started my career as a journalist, which was great because it was my professional duty to learn something new every day and share it with the world. In that job, I started to learn the power of data. I learned that numbers could be a better predictor of what was going on than what politicians and administrators were saying. For instance, I was once interviewing a principal of a school who only wanted to talk about how great his school was because they had a new mural in the gym. At the same time, he had the poorst-performing school in the district and no plan about how to improve it.
Because of this power of data, I transitioned my career to become a data journalist. I learned how to request data, analyze it and use SQL and spreadsheets to figure out what was going on with the numbers and use that information to drive my stories. That was great, but as I learned more I realized that it wasn't enough just to give people my analysis of the biggest trends, pacakage them into a 20-inch story and leave the rest of the nubmers by the wayside. I wanted people to see the data for themselves. Data on their school might not have fit into my story but it was still important to them. I wanted to be able to give people access to all of the data I had and let them search through it and find the points that were pertinent to their lives. To do that, I had to learn more. I learned as much as I could on my own but eventually pursued a master's degree in web design and online communication. From there, I learned fundamental principles of design and got a strong HTML/CSS foundation. I went back to work in journalism and made web apps for our readers -- one let them compare all of the restaurants in our county by the number of health violations they received. Another was an award-winning project that included databases and interactive maps combined with a custom design.
I loved it, but I still didn't feel I could do everything I wanted. Most of what I made used the libraries and plug-ins that other people had created. I could make things look nice but I still didn't feel that I really knew what was going on under the hood. I wanted to understand how to build these things from scratch on my own. I wanted to put everything together - the data, the design and the interactivity -- all together and become a front end engineer. Following the path of learning that I've always taken, I enrolled in the best school I could find that would teach me these exact skills I wanted.
I know that even once school is out I'll still have work to do and more to know. But I'm a learner. That's what I do, and I can't wait for the next challenge.