Why I’m Devoting A Year of My Life To Storytelling

When I let people know that I’m spending half my work week enmeshed in data science curriculum, I’m not sure storytelling is what first comes to their mind. But it is what comes to mine.

Let’s rewind back a bit. When I moved to Washington, D.C. at 19 and started an apprenticeship in a program the NY Times dubbed “an alternative to college for the digital elite”, my technical skills were minimal. I had no idea what the command line was and couldn't read any code past the most basic of HTML.

What I did come in with, however, was a brief background in applying strategy to help marketing campaigns grow and a deep hunger to become an integral part of a company.

My apprenticeship placed me at a startup named Brazen. It’s likely worth mentioning that while stationed there for a year — the company grew over 5x, raised another round of funding, changed its name, and received recognition after recognition in the DC startup scene. Within this role, I gained a family. And as any family does, especially one rooted in the trenches of a quickly growing tech startup during some of my most impressionable years, they left quite the imprint.

One of the facets of that imprint was a new skill that completely altered the way I think, and my future trajectory — the programming language MySQL. Now, MySQL (pronounced My-Ess-Que-Ell) allows one to query a database and essentially ask and answer questions at varying levels of complexity.

I’m not sure our CTO Jason knew quite what he opened up when he offered to bridge the gap between online curriculum and real-world application via Brazen’s software as a service (SaaS), but my value to the…