What follows is a growing collection of examples of why I am grateful to be a part of this community.

I met @jaredlander at the 2017 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He gave a phenomenal talk (except for the focus on the NY Giants), and he was gracious in his conversation afterwards. We’ve had several interactions in the ensuing months – What a great mentor!

As a relatively ‘new’ data scientist, I am grateful for leaders in the community who have this attitude. I have been a beneficiary of the patience of others and am grateful when I have the chance to pay it forward to others.

I’ve had the honor of hosting several leaders in the NYR community. I’m very grateful for your time and knowledge passed along to the West Point community.

Hadley Wickham: Hadley Spoke to nearly 600 cadets about introduction to data analysis. Later he “live coded” in a smaller talk to our faculty. Hadley was very gracious and humble and left everyone in awe.

Max Kuhn: I may have been the most nervous hosting Max. He set in on a class I was giving to my cadets on Logistic Regression. I should have planned better :)

JD Long: I didn’t tweet about your talk during your time at West Point - but this place still buzzes from your talk in Spring 2018.

David Robinson: DRob spoke to a packed house about Empirical Bayes and Tidy Text.

Emily Robinson: Emily! Why didn’t I use twitter when you were here?! Great talk about A/B Testing (Even if I don’t have Twitter proof)