by Elektra Sheldon

For John Rauser there are so many communities he wants to help. Before he had his current job, he was a computer programmer and overheard the owner of the business talking about his worries and questions. John helped out with the area of need and the owner liked it so John started doing that job full time instead.

Back then people didn’t have a name for what he was doing. Now it is called a data scientist. That business owner liked what he was doing and hired him, so in a way he just kind of slipped into his current job.

John’s daily routine has basically two parts, the first part is meetings. He sits in meetings and he tells his colleagues his progress and also gives them reports, he also listens to his colleagues and they tell him their questions and worries so that after the meeting he can go and find the data that is needed and related to the questions. John finds data that gives insight for their business’s needs. John then needs to give clean and organized data to the colleagues, so that even if their peers don’t understand they can still get the gist of what the data means. It has to be organized with clear language and data visualizations so that when they present it to their company it’s clean with diagrams and precise wording. After they’ve collected the data they have to understand the numbers and they can graph it if needed, so they can see it in different ways to know what it means, then they can make a report on the data they’ve found.

In John’s free time he likes to design computer programs. Currently he is working on a simulation of the solar system. “It shows the planets and moon in their orbits around the sun,” John says. He was inspired to learn more about space and the solar system and other planets so he is making some programs and doing research on it in his free time. As you can see, even in John’s free time he loves data. John’s father helped him learn all of this programing because when he was a kid his role model was his father, who was as electrical engineer and would make the electronics that went inside computers. His father helped develop his passion for his job now.

His favorite part of his job is to make all the numbers into charts and graphs. The largest data he’s ever worked with had a petabyte of numbers. That is a lot. I will explain it to you:

Megabyte, M.B:1,000,000 bytes

Gigabyte, G.B:1,000,000,000 bytes

Terabyte,T.B:1,000,000,000,000 bytes

Petabyte,P.B:1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Xobyte,X.B:1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Lotabyte,L.B:1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Yes, that is a lot of bytes.

John also works on the program for SnapChat. He makes sure that it works smoothly, so that people on the other side of the world can contact others all over, and learn what they celebrate, how they dress and what they eat. John contributes to his community by helping people all over the world share their traditions and experiences.

Sometimes you look for a job that fits you for a while before you find it, and sometimes the job just finds you. Well that’s what happened to John Rauser, and now he helps communities all over the world contact others using a program that John helped to design.