Numbers are my best friend (not literally--I have real friends too, I promise). I have vivid memories of the highs I would get from successfully solving practice problems in algebra and calculus classes in middle school and high school. That’s where it all started. From there, my love for numbers brought me to the world of transaction advisory and business valuations, where those numbers served as the foundation for complex financial models I built to answer companies’ questions about their mergers and acquisitions and financial reporting. What ultimately led me to data science was the discovery that numbers are not only for solving problems, but for telling beautiful stories as well. Through it all, it’s been that aha! feeling from making sense of messiness that has brought me joy while also motivating me to continuously seek new challenges. These days, the challenges I’m tackling most often involve my skills with programming in Python and R, database management and querying, and data visualization tools such as Tableau and Power BI. However, there is still SO MUCH I aspire to learn and new challenges to tackle within data science--and I cannot wait. When I am not being a data nerd, I am probably writing about being a data nerd, competitive powerlifting, creating fashion blog content or reading self-help books (in that order).