Plotly’s student ambassador of the month is Teddy Ward, an Earth and Ocean Sciences and Computer Science student at Duke University. Teddy has successfully recruited 10 Duke students to Plotly and is aiming to introduce to site to 100+ more! He was gracious enough to answer a few questions about how he uses Plotly and applies it to his work flow. Plotly recently sent him an awesome company t-shirt to rep in North Carolina.
Do you use Plotly on a regular basis and recruit folks from your university? Let us know. You might be Ploty’s next student ambassador of the month!
1. What role does data currently play in your life?
Data plays a huge role in everything I do, from what articles I get to read on Facebook to who plays for the sports teams I watch. I read FiveThirtyEight obsessively, and Nate Silver and company do a spectacular job of showing the simple statistics in everything, from presidential primaries to crossword puzzles. They use data to explain the world, and so do I. I study Earth and Ocean Sciences and Computer Science at Duke, and every day I learn more about how the environment and our planet responds to micro events, like today’s beautiful high-of-77-in-early-March days, or macro events like global warming.
2. When did you realize that you wanted to explore a career in data science?
I am not going to be a data scientist right out of college, but that doesn’t mean that data science won’t be a big part of my career. Every job that I have will require me managing data in some way, whether for business analytics, programming productivity, or even the variety of music that I listen to while I work. Wherever I have data, I can use Plotly to make it beautiful.
3. What do you see as the most interesting application for you with Plotly (now or in the future)?
The beauty of Plotly for me is that it’s incredible for everyone. Everyone has to make a graph at some point, and they can use Plotly to do so. I use Plotly because I think that it is the best data visualization library for Python and Javascript there is, but the cloud editing tools give the ability for anyone of any level of experience to visualize data they come into contact with. So I think Plotly would be a great tool for education: teaching people to read data, teaching people to present data, or even teaching people to program.
More specifically, however, I would love to see Plotly applied to Earth Science problems everywhere. No one can ever learn too much about the planet we live on. So with that in mind, I recently made a bunch of graphs, which will be included in an academic paper to be submitted soon, showing the total estimated cost to society from global forest fire emissions by region (e.g. Boreal North America) and by type of chemical emitted (e.g. CO2).