While this site is mostly about my experience with data and statistics, when I am not playing with data sets, you can most often find me hiking, playing soccer, or just hanging out with my dog. Here’s a picture of me and some of my soccer buddies.
My name is Ryan Curtis. I am a young professional looking to break into the world of data. While my undergraduate academic career was the genesis of my interest in statistics, my professional development working at the court has cemented my interest and passion for the field.
I was initially hired as a court clerk, performing clerical and customer-centric duties as well as assisting the judge and clerking court proceedings. One day, I received an email prompting our court to fill out an annual survey from the Bureau of Justice Statistics regarding our probationee population. I leaped at the opportunity to work on a project such as this and my supervisor agreed. I became acquainted with our query-based software BIT (Businesses Intelligence Tool) which allowed me to create queries to sift through and select cases with certain parameters, such as final disposition, filing date, sentencing date, etc.. This was vital as our case management database consists of tens of thousands of cases, tracking every filed case since the 90’s. Upon completing and submitting the survey, I continued to utilize BIT in conjunction with Microsoft Excel to create tables and visualizations of court data for evaluation by our court administrator and Judge. This way I also became our pseudo court statistician and was promoted to Court Coordinator for our budding Therapeutic Court program.
With my new position, it then became my responsibility to track data on all participants for usage in evaluations, grants, and surveys, eventually using this data toapply for and secure further funding for our program. I took it upon myself to learn Python in order to enhance my ability to interpret and create visualizations from our data. Since then I have created a number of visualizations and reports for a plethora of purposes. These ranged from usage in grant applications to secure funding, to evaluations conducted by other agencies or the court itself. My experience working with python has also lead me to conduct some personal side projects solely in the interest of my own curiosity and development (you can check them out on the projects tab on my page!) My time in the professional field of data has been brief but I am excited to continue my journey and enhance both myself and the world around me through the usage and exploration of data!