Official Story
Deepna received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, Texas in 2014. A month later, she joined Clayton Curtis' lab in NYU's Center for Neural Science and Psychology for a postdoctoral fellowship. Seven months into the fellowship, she decided to leave academia to pursue a career in Data Science. She was accepted into the 8-week Insight Data Science Fellowship in Data Science. A week later, she received her first job as a Data Scientist at Viacom, a media beast that owns 16 network brands, including Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Spike, BET, and Nickelodeon. While at Viacom, she enjoyed working with fun data and informing the business decisions of chief media executives. She is now the Director of Data Science at Dotdash (formerly About.com), working across many teams on a variety of interesting problems, managing a team of 3 data scientists, and (shameless plug) looking to hire two more.
Unofficial Story
Deepna grew up in a small town in West India exhibiting all characteristics of an only child, fitting all stereotypes of an Indian kid: obedient daughter, star student, teacher's pet, addicted bookworm, social conformist, and a spelling bee champion with aspirations of becoming a medical doctor. When she was 13, she moved to Texas with her parents, who quickly started pursuing the American dream, while she struggled through a major culture shock. Over the next decade, she discovered that human behavior was more interesting (and less nauseating) to study than the human body. After three degrees dedicated towards research in Psychology/Neuroscience (B.S., M.S., & Ph.D.), she graduated with many accolades, research awards and conference talks, and only 1 first-author paper, 'In Submission', to show for. Several excuses ensued; one of which was terrible choices of disillusioned advisors. Weiji adopted her in times of much desperation and became a mentor, also advising her to finally cut the umbilical cord from Texas and move to NYC for a postdoc fellowship at NYU (his most convincing argument: "All cool people eventually move to the Northeast."). The security was short-lived. As she witnessed her academic heroes scrambling around for grants, terrifying reality checks began to creep in. The big city had also planted bigger dreams. Some serious introspection (many thoughts to share here), much support from her predecessors, and a lot of luck led her to data science - a field she didn't even know existed a year before she plunged for it. A couple years in, she still gets to work on a variety of fun, challenging problems with smart people (a mini-lab of ex-academics actually) and enjoys the ability to make tangible impact on a quick time scale. The lifelong impostor syndrome is still alive, although makes less frequent appearances now. During day-to-day work crises (#firstworldjobproblems), she finds solace in the fact that at least she never has to write a grant again. Unlike some of her colleagues, she does not regret her academic life. When she retires from the "real world", she secretly hopes to return to academia to teach whatever she has learned. For now, she welcomes all opportunities to convince a fellow despondent academic that there is a world out there, where 95% of us have gone to and found happiness and decent success - it's still called the "alternative-career" world.