Hi. I'm Henry Loughlin.

For a long time, I thought of there being two different worlds — the 'quant' world and the 'qual' world. From a young age, I was often told that I was a 'numbers person,' but I could never maintain my interest in math or science long enough to gain true confidence in my abilities, particularly in algebra and calculus. In college, I vacillated among a number of interests, including American studies, economics, education, and politics, but looked at the 'quant' kids — studying things like business, computer science, mathematics, or hard sciences — and thought they had too much homework. My work ethic certainly developed at Brandeis, but I was not about to over-extend myself by going 'quant'.

As it was, I started my career in marketing, but quickly became interested in expanding my toolkit to include data analysis — I always found those projects the most fun. At first, I looked at Pivot Tables and conditional formatting with some trepidation, but eventually found my feet. Friends who program encouraged me to learn to code, but after a 'Hello, world' in each of Java and Python, I was not very interested. My excuse was always 'that's too much work, I'd have to read the directions.' To me, it was easier to say that I didn't have time.

Then the pandemic happened, I got laid off, and I realized that my excuse was no longer valid. I dove headlong into learning Python and, after a month or so, felt that I had found my feet after successfully scraping a Wikipedia table. Then I started to experiment with ML and realized how little I truly knew.

A lot has happened in the time since! In addition to discovering a passion for Python, I have expanded my toolkit to include data-relevant technologies like R — albeit I retain a strong preference for Python's syntax — and SQL. Moreover, I am intrigued by C, C++, Java, and JavaScript, among others, and am curious to learn more conceptually about Carbon and Rust. Whatever the direction, there are plenty of applications and domains to explore — and that's what keeps me going.