Isaac Schmidt‍

See below for my various work and club experience!

CNA Corporation

I am currently an Associate Research Analyst in the Predictive Analytics team and the Data Science Division at CNA Corporation, a position I have held since June 2022. At CNA, I work on a number of concurrent projects in support of the United States Navy, primarily relating to maintenance and force readiness. My work spans across all phases of the data science lifecycle, including collecting data, data wrangling, dashboarding, statistical hypothesis testing, implementing machine learning algorithms, and presenting results to senior Navy leaders.

Teaching

Data 102

In Spring 2022, I was a GSI for Data 102, a course that “develops the probabilistic foundations of inference in data science.” In addition to teaching discussion section, lab section, and holding office hours, I took on the role of head GSI. This involved being the main point of contact for students in the course, leading weekly staff meetings, and generally overseeing course logistics, such as the operation of midterm exams and student accommodations. See my evaluations here.

For my role this semester, I received an Outstanding GSI Award.

Stat 375

Stat 375 is a new pedagogy course that is offered to first-time (u)GSIs for statistics and data science courses. In Fall 2021, I led a section of about 25 undergraduates, during which we discussed teaching practices and worked through practical activities. I highly enjoyed relaying my experiences as an uGSI to help foster the next cohort of teachers.

In addition to leading the section, I graded homework and assisted Professor Andrew Bray in lesson planning for the course, as this was its first offering. You can check out the current iteration of the course website here, and my evaluations here.

Data 100

Data 100 is an upper-division data science course that “explores key areas of data science including question formulation, data collection and cleaning, visualization, statistical inference, predictive modeling, and decision making.”

In Summer 2021, I was acting instructor for the course, alongside Raguvir Kunani. I recorded four new lectures for the course, which are linked below:

• Lecture 16 - Bias and Variance
• Lecture 17 - Cross-Validation and Regularization
• Lecture 24 - Clustering I
• Lecture 25 - Clustering II
• Also check out Lecture 23 on Principal Component Analysis, which was built from scratch by myself and Raguvir.

My evaluations from Summer 2021 are here.

Before becoming instructor, I was an undergraduate student instructor (uGSI) for the three semesters—Summer 2020, Fall 2020, and Spring 2021. I led discussion sections, assisted in reviewing and releasing assignments, wrote and graded exams, as well as helped students in remote video office hours and through our online forum. Additionally, in the Spring 2021 semester, I recorded videos that walked students through the weekly lab assignment, which you can see here. Also check out my anonymous student evaluations from the summer, fall, and spring.

From a student on Piazza:

To the TA who makes the walkthrough videos:

You are amazing :) . I think the walkthrough videos are so, so good! You are so engaging and passionate- one of the few (of the many, many) recorded videos I watch every day that I don’t get distracted in- I am actually engaged and learning through the entire video. And thank you for going through every, single detail in the lab- even the charts/sections that don’t require answers or just general concepts that relate to the questions.

Honestly, these walkthrough videos have contributed a LOT to my understanding of the material. You are a wonderful teacher!

In Spring 2020, I worked as a tutor, which involved grading homework and helping students in office hours.

In Fall 2018 and Fall 2019, I worked as an academic intern for two other classes—CS 61A, then Data 8. An academic intern helps out GSIs in labs and office hours, and is considered the first rung on the teaching ladder.

SAG @ Berkeley

Sports Analytics Group at Berkeley is a student-run club that seeks to prepare members for a career in the sports industry. I served as Vice President and head of the Projects Division, where students work on analytics-based consulting projects or their own independent research. My current responsibilities include recruiting new members to the club, overseeing the different individual projects, and reaching out to sports industry professionals to build connections. Prior to becoming VP, I led a project team working with the San Francisco Giants, and worked on a few other student teams—see projects.

Research

• Starting in Summer 2020, I was a research assistant with Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation, under the supervision of Dr. Karen Chapple. I helped build a model to determine the factors affecting the construction of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) in California. I also provided query results to the Terner Center for Housing Innovation to present in a policy brief, for which I was fortunate enough to be listed as a co-author. I’ve also helped out with wrangling large, proprietary datasets, such as Zillow’s ZTRAX data on property transactions, and Infogroup’s consumer database. In Fall 2021, I worked with the California Department of Housing and Community Development to perform quality control on the data the department receives from the hundreds of jurisdictions in California. Most recently, I worked on a team creating a measure of displacement in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. See projects for more information.
• In Spring 2020, I assisted PhD candidate Teddy Forscher of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center with his research project on e-commerce shopping habits, the environment, and COVID-19. I cleaned and re-structured the results of his survey pre-test to guide the creation of his final survey, and then did the same with the final survey results to make the data easier to analyze. His paper, within which I was acknowledged, is available here “You’re the best data wrangler I know.” - Teddy

Other Work

• I was a student assistant in the Facilities branch of UC Berkeley’s Athletics Department. I prepared Haas Pavilion for games and practices by setting up and breaking down basketball hoops, volleyball nets, the scorers’ table, and other equipment. I trained new workers to do these tasks, both on-the-job and through instructional videos that I created. I was also a ballboy for a few Pac-12 volleyball games in 2019.
• Throughout high school and college summers, I worked at The Baird Center, which holds the administrative offices for a local recreation department. At the front desk, I enrolled customers in activities, set up the center for town events, and was a point of contact for general questions about the department. One summer, I was also a gate attendant at the community pool. Previously, I enjoyed being involved in various youth sports organizations—I umpired intramural baseball games (ages 9-13), and operated the scoreboard for middle school travel basketball games.