So one thing that's really shaped my career was, going to a community college. I came from Russia, and the first thing I did was to go to a community college. And it was a really wonderful place. I've never expected to meet so many great people. A lot of them ended up going to top universities and really great companies. And, most importantly, we kept our friendships with those people. So meeting those fellow students shaped my career. I chose to do engineering. The path in engineering that I chose initially was biomedical. I have to say that I chose biomedical engineering because I felt more comfortable. There were more girls there, and I just felt like I belonged a bit better. And as I graduated, this was 2012. I have to also be honest and say it was a little bit tough. The field was new. I struggled with finding my first job. An internship that I did in control systems and robotics in the medical field made me really interested in robotics. So for my masters, I got my master's in robotics and dynamic systems and controls at UC San Diego, which is a wonderful place. And yeah, since then, I worked in a few different fields that I'm happy to talk about. And, I currently work at Apple in Acoustic Systems.

As I mentioned I do control systems engineering in the audio department at Apple. My day job is typically a mixture of data science and digital signal processing. And lately, it's been a bit of machine learning as well. As far as the days go, it's usually quite a few meetings because, in industry, everything is very intertwined. And all the teams work together really closely to work. Want to make one solid product? So a lot of it is meetings to make decisions that impact several teams. After that, I spend a lot of time writing code, typically python. And for the rest of it is, a little bit of free time to network and figure out what the others around me are doing. And as far as travel goes, typically at Apple, we traveled to Asia as we do a lot of our manufacturing there. So you would go to see suppliers and see other teams. If you're developing a product, sometimes you would be traveling to Europe. And lastly, the very nice thing about Apple and I'm sure other companies do this is, self-development. I went to NeurIPS. And that was for me, a part of my own, self-development that I could do at Apple. So you're free to choose. What you think you know helps you at work and helps you learn and grow as an engineer. So that would be what the travel entails.

I really strongly like Python. I think it is very promising for students and for industries. It's very high in demand. It's easy to find a job, and it does what it says. It will do very well. It may not be the most efficient language in terms of the time complexity, of algorithms. But for prototyping and development work, it's very good, very easy. And you get a lot done quickly. If you're working with larger data, as a lot of us are these days, Python has really great packages. Pandas is one of my favorites, and the other part of data science is how do you visualize these big data sets that always come up? And I think while a lot of data, visualization, tools, and frameworks exist, for example, the typical Matt plot Lib and Seaborn libraries and Altair. I feel like the industry these days is headed towards interactive data visualization. And you could see it like last week when I went to NeurIPS. There was one of the startups was called Stream Lick, and they were specifically interested in Python being the back end, and you could create a Web browser for interactive data visualization. And I thought that's really great. And I'm seeing that more and more. And I think interactive data tools are very useful. So, yeah, I believe in python open-source and interactive data visualization.