First Blog Post…Again

Hi. I’m Jennifer. You don’t know me, and that’s fine.

I graduated from my master’s program in environmental science this past summer, and I have been job searching for seven months since graduation (which has been a roller coaster of chaos and misery, but that’s another story for another day). During my job search, I performed Google searches on how to strengthen my job application for data analyst jobs. An alumnus from my grad program that I recently contacted told me this useful tip — he obtained his GIS analyst job of several years through showing work samples from his GIS portfolio during his interview. After that conversation, I opened a GitHub repository for a personal website I made as a class assignment and began adding my GIS and coding examples to it. It’s still a work in progress.

Another Google search in “data science portfolios” led me to this blog post and this blog post, which informed me that a blog is a great way to build your profile in addition to a portfolio. And that is why I am here today, at Medium, to start building a blog.

I have attempted blogging and journaling in the past (hence why the title is “First Blog Post…Again”). I wrote a private spiritual blog on Blogger during my undergraduate years. I started an environmental blog on WordPress, which only had a few posts. I even attempted journaling on a physical journal about my mental health. None of them lasted long because I could not keep the consistency of writing on a regular basis.

I honestly don’t know why I couldn’t stay consistent with my blogging. Was it my fear that I would have nothing useful or novel to say? Was it my concern that reviewing and proofreading my own writing would take too long? Was it me using the chaos and unpredictability of real life as an excuse to stop myself from writing regularly?

All I know is that the perfectionist side of me has stopped me from doing many things before. And many times I have worked on either making my emails, reports, or data visualizations perfect…only to realize I’ve already wasted so much time that I missed out on other things. Not to mention the horrible habit of constantly comparing my own work to others’ and wondering how they are so much better than me. I’m slowly getting out of that habit though.

Anyways, here is my first blog post. How consistent will I be in writing this time, how often do I want to write, what topics (data science related, hopefully) should I write about…I don’t have answers right now. All I know is that if I keep waiting for those “perfect blog posts” to appear, I will never write them.