Walter Sands

Data Science MS

Personal Bio

I grew up in St Paul, MN and have spent the majority of my life in Minnesota. Taking some time away by spending a year abroad for my undergraduate degree in Sweden. I also spent time in Montana doing trail maintenance in and around Glacier National Park for a year. Nowadays, I spend most of my time playing video/board games, watching anime and building/painting warhammer models.

Professional Bio

Prior to joining the Data Science graduate program at UMN I worked as a Data Engineer for three years. Starting as a consultant for Anthem and later working with Home Depot. At both companies I was focused on anomaly detection efforts regarding product ordering and pipeline results. Starting from very basic evaluations of how different one day is from the previous to taking into account seasonality and trends to better predict what the results should look like. Before that I got a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from UMD with a minor in mathematics. My goals from joining the DSMMA program is to explore more interesting data sets and get a better understanding of techniques that can be used to gain insights from them.