[Seth Green speaking]

I went to UVA in 2002, and I didn't know what I wanted to study, but I ended up majoring in philosophy and doing a minor in history and studying a lot of different humanities. I started a band when I was at UVA. I was gigging on the corner and playing bar gigs and playing house parties. By the time I was done with school, it was like, I don’t know what I want to do, but I know I want to keep doing this.

So, I ended up being a full-time musician and touring for about nine years. All of us in the band were broke, except for our keyboard player, A Wilson. He had a job, doing part time work as a draftsman, and was doing work in the back of the van on his laptop. And I remember thinking, like, I need something like this.

So, I was sitting in the back of the van downloading classes from Coursera and trying to learn web development. I ended up going back to UVA to go to the data science school. I was coming in initially with the real kind of imposter syndrome of like, what do I know about any of this stuff? One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned of sort of switching and trying new things, continuing to grow, is not being afraid to say, there's a lot here I don’t understand.

There’s a lot here, I don’t know. Now, I'm the director of data science at Metrum Research Group. We build tools to help scientists do drug discovery and analyze clinical trial data and work to bring medications to patients. The thing that really drew me to data science, coming from the humanities is the storytelling aspect to it. We have all this information.

Can we make some meaning out of that?

I think that’s where the philosophy comes back in.

They call it the humanities. Like, what's the point of literature? What’s the point of philosophy? It’s hard to even articulate, but it's kind of help us understand. Here we are in the world. What’s going on? What are we here to do? Those are not the questions that a bot can answer.

What’s really become valuable is being able to think in an abstract way and being able to think critically.

I really sampled a lot of things at UVA and maybe take for granted how much that informed my worldview.