#142 From PhD drop-out to Google Data Scientist with Megan Risdal
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2024
⏱️ 110 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Meg Risdal. She's a data scientist and Product Manager at Kaggle, Google's Data Science competition platform.
Megan works closely with the global data science community, and on Google's Gemma open models project.
We talk about:
- Google's Kaggle, which hosts 300k open data sets and runs data science competitions each week that anyone can participate in.
- How people talk in academia VS how people talk in tech
- Stack Overflow VS Kaggle – how Megan contrasts what it was like to work on these two "communities of practice"
- Linguistics and its importance in LLMs and AI research
Can you recognize the song I'm playing during the intro? It's a punk song from 1994.
Be sure to follow The freeCodeCamp podcast in your favorite podcast app. And share this podcast with a friend. Let's inspire more folks to learn to code and build careers for themselves in tech.
Also, I want to thank the 10,779 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
Meg's blog: https://www.meg.dev/
The Sliced Data Science Gameshow that Meg co-hosted with Nick Wan: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PX3YIZuHhyQmXKnyZmVDzdgAYbzwgDw
Meg on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeganRisdal
Kaggle's open learning resources: https://www.kaggle.com/learn
The Gemma team at Google that Meg also works on: https://ai.google.dev/gemma
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Apart from your time, and of course that is important, but apart from your time, there's no reason you can't just apply for roles and even go through the interview process. You'll learn a lot from going through that experience. I would also say, you know, certainly seek out feedback from, you know, people like myself or others who've, you know, gone through this transition, |
| 0:22.6 | get feedback on your resume, get feedback on your portfolio, get feedback on how you communicate, |
| 0:28.6 | because I think one of the Free Coke Camp podcast. |
| 0:58.7 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of FreecodeCamp.org. |
| 1:02.3 | Each week we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people in tech. |
| 1:06.4 | This week we're talking with Meg Rizzdahl. |
| 1:09.5 | She's a data scientist and product manager at Kaggle, and she works closely with the |
| 1:14.3 | data science community. |
| 1:15.8 | Meg, welcome. |
| 1:17.2 | Hey, Quincy. |
| 1:18.2 | Thanks for having me on. |
| 1:19.3 | I'm super excited to be here. |
| 1:21.5 | Yeah, we're super excited to have you here. |
| 1:24.0 | You're somebody whom I've talked with for years. |
| 1:27.4 | You and I have been like corresponding |
| 1:29.3 | about like open data sets and just machine learning education and different topics like that |
| 1:34.3 | because you're really at the vanguard working over at Google slash Kaggle and just |
| 1:40.1 | helping the data science community, the machine learning community, maybe you can talk a |
| 1:45.1 | little bit about what Cagle is for people who've never heard of it. Yeah, for sure. So for |
| 1:51.8 | those who haven't heard of Cagle, most people do know of us as a machine learning competitions |
| 1:57.6 | platform. So that's kind of been our bread and butter. It's kind of the |
| 2:02.8 | soul of Cagle is the competitions that bring together our community of over 18 million registered |
... |
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