CDS Incredible Alumni Series: Interview with Deja Bond
Meet CDS Alumni and DeepMind Fellow, Deja Bond. You may have recently heard about Deja when she was featured in the Philadelphia Tribune earlier this month for being the first African-American woman to earn a postgraduate degree in Data Science from New York University.
Prior to her time at CDS, Deja obtained a Bachelor’s Degree at Spelman College in Computer Science and interned at the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History.
We caught up with Deja to discuss her recent milestone, what sparked her initial interest in data science, and her overall experience at CDS.
This interview was lightly edited for clarity.
First and foremost congratulations on graduating this past May. Tell us how you found your way to CDS and to ultimately studying data science.
Thank you. I was working as a Salesforce Developer for a company called Appirio, (a Salesforce premier partner and Wipro company) when I graduated a semester early from undergrad. At the time I figured if I’m going to pursue a higher degree, it should be for something that I like to do. I ended up choosing data science after my internship at the Smithsonian — I worked with A LOT of data, and it was pretty cool. Once I realized that the field I was looking to study was data science, I really started researching top programs in the field. I was planning on applying to a few schools: NYU, Columbia, Stanford, and Harvard. But it was important that I attend a school that cared about me. In a lot of programs you’ll find that they only really care about your research and it’s really competitive among students. What I found about NYU is that it’s a very open community. They definitely are more concerned with you actually understanding concepts than they are with scrutinizing scores or grades. When I visited the campus, it just felt like home.
Tell us a bit about what you plan to do next.
Since I’m the first African-American woman to obtain a post-graduate Data Science degree from NYU, I’ve been getting a lot of press. But there are many people who helped me along the way that I would like to recognize. Caleb Lewis, former CDS student, and CDS MS graduate Tatenda Ndambakuwa were definitely a part of my support system.
As far as next steps, I’ve been networking and interviewing, but career-wise I’m planning to become a Product Manager. My goal is to combine my previous experiences and skills — my data science mastery, my research, and user experience knowledge — to make products better and provide a world class user experience, to make it more empathetic to meet user needs so that the customers know that a product was created for them and they are always top of mind.
What role do you hope your research will play in the future of data science?
When I was working for Appirio as a SalesForce Developer, I would implement custom Apex scripts to clients for features they wanted on the platform. There’s one project that stands out in particular where I took the initiative. Our company launched this feature called Einstein, which was like an initial step for them into data science, but it was very linear. However, on this project I was tasked with matching the best salesperson with the best client. We used red, yellow, or green to categorize the status of each project (green being the best.) And our goal was to get more projects in the green. In the end through looking at the data I was able to determine which sales workers should be let go. Not that I want to fire people (laughs) but I realized that I want to be able to figure out what users want and create a better customer experience. That’s what I really want — to apply my data science and machine learning skills to make a better product.
Do you have any final thoughts about data science or CDS in general that you’d like to share?
I worked with a lot of great professors and staff including Kathryn Angeles (Director of Academic and Student Affairs) and Loraine Nascimento (Head of External Relations and Career Development) and so many great students.
I can see CDS is becoming more diverse which is great. Hopefully I have brought some awareness to data science as a field because it’s not something that we’re taught about in the computer science world. Even product management was something that I first learned about at CDS.
There were highs and lows in the program but I would say to anyone (at CDS) who is having a difficult time to reach out to those in the CDS community. They’re definitely very supportive and really there for you — it’s the most wonderful program.
By Ashley C. McDonald
