Julia Silge on Switching Careers from Academia and Finding Her Passion in Data Science

On the personal side, I’ve been married for 16 years and have 3 kids, ages 12, 9, and 7. Life as a mom who works in tech can be pretty intense sometimes! I don’t know if I have anything original or compelling to say about work-life balance or how to “have it all” but I do get a lot of hugs every day and have a life rich in the glorious mess that is family.

When I started my transition into data science, I said yes to pretty much every opportunity that came my way, even if it felt slightly beyond my skill set or experience level. I said yes to local hackathons where I built a network of friends and professional colleagues in my city, I said yes to contributing to open source software, and I said yes to speaking at conferences where I shared my own work and learned so much from others. I said yes to many of these things when it felt like I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

I continued to say yes until I reached a point where I was overextended, and was rather out of balance in life. I had reached a point of enough success in my field that I could not say yes to all the good opportunities open to me. Saying yes is powerful, especially when you are at the beginning of a new adventure, but saying no is also important and at times necessary. My advice is to experiment with saying yes with abandon, but to be wise enough to notice when you need to pull back.

At the risk of being sentimental, my spouse Rob is who comes to mind with this question. We’ve been married a really long time now, and a lot of our marriage plays out in the normal routines of our workdays, our evenings, our days off. At the same time there is deep delight in our partnership; no other relationship in my life has brought me such freedom to be my true and whole self. We have walked through so many changes, whether that was my own career or parenthood or our maturing understandings of who we are, individually and as a couple. The reality of marriage is about everyday life, not a romantic high, and my experience of that has been full of joy.

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