The role of our (own) superiors vs inferiors

I first read about Ines Montani in her blogpost in 2017, while trying to install spaCy for my Rasa NLU framework.

(There were too many errors and I finally switched to Linux, but even as a developer completely new to Natural Language Processing, I got great support from the explosion.ai team, especially Ines.)

She wrote about how she combined two things she was passionate about - language and programming - and I couldn't be more excited to have come across something I was trying at myself.

Stringing words is second nature to me, I do it when I'm writing and I do it while I'm not. So the prospects, while intriguing, remained unexplored until a year later. But to this day I smile at how I gravitated towards NLP and how I didn't see it coming back in 2017 while reading that blogpost.

But of course I'm here to write about our inferiors. Those tiny bullet points at the bottom of the resume listed under Activities/Hobbies.

I was a confused kid growing up. (Some would say I still am, but who isn't?) I grew up in a beautiful world of comprehensive development. My brothers always played football, my friends were all singers, dancers, writers or artists, and they carried it with them through school and college. And I have well developed inferiors that I carry with me.

All is good.

Yet the role of inferiors in life is that it attracts you the way a drug would because, well, it is your drug. So while you work on math/programming, you may think you'd have been better off as an artist, simply because your superior is always working in the background - almost so that you forget the superior exists. Like breathing. While your inferior draws you on.

I do not know if it affects some more than others but I have reason to believe it does. And for those of us that face this malady, once we combine them with the superior, it's paradise. And relief :)

I know people have different reasons for choosing to be in the field of data science -  maybe because they simply liked it, or because it was termed sexiest job of the 21st century (they say it's already saturated.. let's see), maybe they got into a job that did analytics and loved it, or maybe just because.

I've met people in my master's program who've made me wish I could read what they wrote in their application SOP, because they seem so similar that I wonder if Joel charted out friend-pairs while picking our cohort. Not to say any of them are mutually exclusive, I've met artists and statisticians and people who want to change the world and of course, scientists.

In this very short span of time, I'm truly grateful for the way this has worked out.

PS: While we're at it, here's something interesting from earlier this semester :-)