Day 555 of 1000

This is day 9 of not driving the new car.

Kelly’s summer internship opportunities continue to expand.  She has a phone interview with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University up in Maryland for a position that is all statistics all the time.  We frequently talk about the difference between engineering/science commodity jobs versus specialty jobs.  Specialty jobs are much better in a field that is expanding.  Even though are a gazillion mechanical engineering jobs out there for people who can design and build a widget, there are two gazillion good mechanical engineers that have experience and want the job.  On the other hand, if you are very specialized, there might be only 50 jobs in the entire for your skills.  Still, if there are only 25 people who are specialized in that area, you are in pretty good shape.

I have a very specialized career in something called machine vision.  I got into the field of machine vision when it was a brand new technology and have stayed there ever since.  I tell people that people rarely need what I do, but when they need it, the need can get pretty desparate because there are not many people who have deep experience in my specialization.  The entire field of analytics and statistics feels like machine vision in its early days.  I know that because I have started running into to problems that are very difficult to solve using deterministic or simple stochastic methods.  Answers need to be extracted from very large data sets using sophisticated statistcal techniques.  There are LOTS of these kinds of problems in every field imaginable.  There are not enough statisticians being graduated from universities.

I think Kelly is in a pretty good place right now.  This is fun to watch because Kelly is a statistician, but pretty painful in my day job when the deep statistical skills we need are not available.