About Me

I am a recent graduate from Colorado State University with degrees in Data Science, Economics, and Theatre. I love music, beer, and getting outdoors. I like to find a balance between my work and my passions, and I have just completed a neural network that's trained to produce original beer recipes. I enjoy writing code and music and plays, and I try to challenge myself whenever I can. There are always new things to learn and skills to develop. I'm excited to be starting my career in data science, developing code and developing myself.

Contact Details

Ryan Volkert
(720) 532-4587
rvolk75@gmail.com

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Education

Colorado State University

B.S. in Data Science • May 2021

As a data scientist at CSU, we cover topics from data wrangling to data visualization to machine learning. I have completed a variety of projects involving all areas of the data science pipeline. The program emphasized the mathematics and statistics behind machine learning methods, including work on optimization algorithms. We discussed the ethics of statistical methods gained experience implementing them in R and Python. For my capstone, I combined data engineering and neural networks to create original beer recipes from a set of scraped recipes.

Colorado State University

B.A. in Economics • May 2021

The Economics Department at Colorado State University provides a diverse education. We have covered advanced econometrics techniques, such as time-series and panel analyses. We have also studied the economics of government policy, which was of particular interest to me. I had the opportunity to study some gender economics and code macros in Microsoft Excel. This program is the reason I went into data science, and I am very grateful for that.

Colorado State University

B.A. in Theatre • May 2021

Being a performer has taught me about myself and others. This program has been indispendible for my growth as a person. I have had the opportunity to be in 11 main stage productions at CSU, developing my skills as a creator. I am thankful for these creative opportunities because they have allowed me to look at data science from a different point of view, increasing my problem-solving capabilities.

Work

Colorado State University

Student Scenic Carpenter • August 2017 - Present

I have been one of the lead technicians for theatre set construction for the past four years. During my time as a carpenter, I have been responsible for directing other students and completing solo and collaborative projects. In these projects, I have had to develop project timelines and deliver on time. This role has taught me about what it means to work hard, efficiently, and in a team.

Nutrien Ag Solutions

Data Science Intern • May 2020 - August 2020

At Nutrien Ag Solutions, I operated more as a full-time developer than as an intern. I lead collaborative projects with other interns and was responsible for accomplishing solo analyses in an efficient manner. One of my main projects was analyzing our marketing email campaign by making use of REST APIs and developing bench marks for subscribers. I also worked with the Twitter API and the Twint Python package to perform an NLP analysis of Tweets interacting with the organzation. For both of these projects, I was expected to communicate my findings through effective visualizations. Finally, I completed the AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials course to prepare for our migration to the AWS Cloud.

Skills

I am trained in machine learning methods in R and Python. The emphasis in my education has been R, but I have taken the time to develop strong Python skills by myself and on the job. I use ggplot for data visualizations in R and am beginning to learn dashboarding programs and packages. I have been working on SQL and have had the chance to build and manage a NoSQL database in MongoDB. I have been managing data in Microsoft Excel for several years, and coding VBA macros is how I got into programming in R and Python.

  • Python
  • SQL
  • Machine Learning
  • R
  • Visualization
  • Microsoft Excel