When you were a child, what did you dream of becoming when you were older? Was it something that came naturally to you? For me it was always to become a singer or a writer.
As a child I used to take every opportunity to perform, whether it was singing the Disney princess ballads or every song from No Doubt’s “Tragic Kingdom” for an “audience” comprised of only my parents, or being the only student who came dressed up in different costumes for every single school project presentation, regardless of the topic. Towards the end of elementary school, I formed an R&B musical group with my best friend from after school daycare. We called ourselves Sugar & Spice and wrote our own songs. The lyrics dealt with racy topics we knew nothing about, such as love and sex, and still astound me to this day. 😂
I was a big musical theatre geek all the way up through high school, with posters from about 20 different musicals plastered all over my room. (I still know all the words to RENT.) For a few years I even took it a step further with some on-stage performances — middle school musical theatre productions, choir performances, classical voice recitals. Alas, with puberty also came an acute self-consciousness that would ultimately stifle my progression in that arena. I knew that I would never be the best singer or performer and that there was no future in it. Eventually, putting myself out there became so mentally taxing that I stopped doing it altogether.
Once I became an avid reader, I also became an avid writer, with a particular passion for poetry. From age 7 onwards, I journaled only in rhymes. Every holiday, birthday or life event was an occasion that had to be commemorated with a poem. I eventually took a stab at writing my own stories — colonial era historical fiction inspired by Felicity from the American Girl series, a fantasy novel reminiscent of the Chronicles of Narnia. Like my ambition as a 6 year old to find a cure for cancer by printing out articles from Encyclopedia Encarta, that era was relatively short-lived. All throughout my school years, I was good at science and math, but I was exceptional in the humanities, and particularly, at writing. I even considered majoring in English in college, until my immigrant mother set me straight. Nowadays I get my writing in through various avenues: a rarely updated food blog, a now defunct gif blog, a couple of other secret short stories blogs that died almost as soon as they were created. (But let’s revive them, Leel!)
Singing and writing have always been passions of mine, and I’d like to think that those things come more naturally to me than the average person (or maybe just the average data scientist ;). It’s the times in my life when I’ve been true to this part of myself that I’ve felt the happiest and most fulfilled. Yet I’ve always struggled with the idea of devoting time and effort to something that ultimately won’t “lead anywhere.” What’s the point of writing a food blog if you have less than a thousand followers? What’s the point of classical voice training if you’ll never perform on stage? What’s the point of risking embarrassment or not getting the validation you expect to receive for your work?
Your fear of looking stupid is holding you back. – Unknown
As I’ve gotten older and become more secure in who I am as a person, I’ve realized that these are silly reasons to not spend time doing something that brings me joy. I loved creating and maintaining my food blog, and to this day I still love going back to old posts from 2012, not just for the recipes (which I do refer to quite often), but to look back and reminisce on a certain part of my life that’s been memorialized through photos and text. Like a tattoo, that blog is a monument to a formative period in my life that I can now always look back on. For this reason alone, it has value. That I haven’t updated it in years is irrelevant.
Escape competition through authenticity. – Naval Ravikant
The need to create is part of what makes us human, and creativity is key to self-actualization. In the past, I tried to strike a balance between creating for myself and for others, and found that I ended up presenting a more curated version of myself in the process and then feeling disappointed when I didn’t receive the validation I’d expected or hoped for. In retrospect, how silly it is to give others control over your journey to self-actualization. I’ve never been very good at catering to the mainstream, nor was I ever willing to compromise my content to any significant degree in order to do so; yet there was always this internal battle between my desire for external validation and my desire to remain true to myself in all of my creative endeavors. Now, the goal is clear: I want to create things that I think are funny and cool first and foremost, and that utilize certain talents or parts of my brain that would otherwise lie dormant.
And with that, I present to you, the most niche little passion project ever: Data Science Music Video Sprints. Covers of great female hip hop and R&B artists, with lyrics related to data science, written and performed by yours truly. I managed to time box my first sprint to a week: wrote the lyrics on a Monday (during my lunch break), recorded the track on a Wednesday evening, filmed and edited (iPhone X and iMovie FTW) Friday through Sunday, uploaded to YouTube that following Monday. People were amazed at how quickly I got it done, but honestly, I had so much fun doing all of it, from the writing to recording to shooting/editing, that it didn’t feel like work at all; it felt like second nature. I just (soft-) released the second music video last week. The plan is to create an EP – 4 tracks in total, each about a different phase of the data science project life cycle. 😂
Obviously this project would not be possible without a network of supportive friends and colleagues who are so utterly keen to be involved. It’s one of the many things I love about Berlin and my life here.
So to everyone who has asked about the “why” behind this project, there you have it. There isn’t really a purpose, except to provide a creative outlet for the expression of my truest, weirdest, nichest self. And to live out my childhood dreams, of course.
