“Wait, you study…WHAT?!”
“Wait, you study…what?!”, if I had a counter for the times I’ve heard this question, the counter would overflow. Don’t worry; there will be no suspense or buildup to the mystery here: I’m a final year student who is doing a double major in Data Science and Creative Writing.
I never knew how rare this combination was until I introduced myself to my peers, teachers, and counselors. Instantly, I would be bombarded with double takes, ‘but why?’s, and ‘wow’s. I would often find myself drawn back by these reactions. They’d never heard of such a bizarre assortment of subjects. At home, I was juggling between Pride and Prejudice and Data Structures. At college, I would head straight to the IT department after my English classes. The change in atmosphere and ambiance was palpable. From being around brightly dressed articulate students holding volumes of books, I would find myself surrounded by hooded and hunched coders smashing on their keyboards and celebrating their ‘aha’ moments. I was all too familiar with these moments; they’d probably navigated around a null pointer exception. However, one thing remained constant — their bafflement of why I would belong to two different worlds. Their puzzlement was driven more from curiosity than any other feeling.
I’ve always loved engrossing myself in fiction and getting my hands dirty with coding. Both my passions — tech and tales — have their place, and studying one over the other seemed unfair. I admit that Creative Writing has had a head-start because I’ve been an avid fiction/self-help reader since before I can remember. I only started coding back in 2018. When I started attending university, I had worked on both of these passions. I was running a personal blog and coding up python pet projects. For me, to leave one of my passions for more ‘prospective’ subjects seemed like a waste.
Maybe they are not that different after all.
At first glance, Creative Writing is a major that leans heavily on reading literature and writing enticing works. Surprisingly, Data Science is also a major that requires reading literature and writing enticing works. Of course, there are some nuances.
My creative works in Data Science must have the power to manipulate the very electrons of a computer to reveal insightful facts about the world we live in. In contrast, Creative Writing must excite the neurons of a brain and take it on a fantastic journey that is different from the world we live in. All I’m saying is, both of these fields are about creating stories, building worlds, and enticing audiences. I repeat once again,
Maybe they are not that different after all.
Both paths often cross into each other. I use my analytical side in storytelling. What are the chances that character X will do action Y? If so, how will Y lead him down to consequence Z? There is a mesh of relations, possibilities, and outcomes hidden beneath a story. It’s almost like crafting a Knowledge Graph without delving into the nightmare that is XML.
Similarly, Creative Writing has influenced my Python skills. I’m the one who leaves funny quips on my Jupyter Notebook comments. Who knew variable names could be double entendre or characters from Robinson Crusoe? Yes, I’m naming my next variable “Friday”.
It can be much broader than writing witty comments or leaving quirky variable names. As I have dove into NLP this year, I have realized there is a wealth of information hidden in the stories we read every day. Let’s look at a few questions that have sprung up in my mind recently.
What can sentiment analysis reveal about character progression in a novel? How has the lexical diversity of a specific genre changed over the years? What genre readily adopts newer terms and ‘slangs’?
In the future, I hope to answer these questions and combine my love for language and nerdiness for Data Science into a meaningful blend of insight.
So How’s it Going?
As I’ve found out, passion is a grade-A fuel for powering you through different fields of study. However, discipline is the fuel line that delivers passion in a controlled and sustainable amount. Both go hand in hand. There are caveats when your cortices serve different fields. Creative Writing is much more taxing on my brain than Data Science is. If I do an hour of coding, I can’t conjure up an article or an essay. Something about frustratingly tuning hyperparameters interferes with my ability to write. There are days where I write more than I code and days where I code more than I write. While I haven’t found a perfect equilibrium, I am happy to say that I wouldn’t have chosen any other combination for my college majors.
