Fishes Make Silly Pets

A fish is an interesting choice for a pet. Given it’s incessant need for water, and inability to maneuver on the dry ground, you can’t play with it. Fish don’t have distinguishable emotions, or perhaps any emotions at all, so it can be difficult to attempt to project emotions upon them. Also, no cute girl is ever going to come up to you and ask if she can pet your fish, while walking your companion through the park. In this case probably the exact opposite would happen as only a very strange person would take his fish to the park. Every reason I can think of to own a pet, is lost on a fish. Yet, fish can be very beautiful. They sit in a glass tank and live their lives, admired for their beauty, and often grace whilst moving through the water. The nature of their residence allows full, uncircumvented observation. No action may go unnoticed. No privacy is held. Yet to a fish, this is nothing. Their only care is to live. They have nothing to hide. This past week I myself was able to spend some time in a fish bowl of sorts.

Why A Fish Bowl???

I was asked in my internship to give a presentation to the executive board of the company concerning the work I had done in the previous month. This was going to be my opportunity both to practice presenting my work, and also for very valuable observation and feedback. The meeting was to take place in a conference room, which is surrounded by windows on all sides. This truly was, in a physical sense, as well as a metaphorical sense, a fish bowl. I was to be observed, and potentially if I was to do well, admired. I was determined to do a phenomenal job.

Gameplan

If you haven’t read any of my previous posts, most of my work I’ve done so far has been to build a model to predict the outcome of an account held by a debt collection agency, ie whether or not someone was going to pay. This required a massive amount of data wrangling, variable reduction and pre processing, but I was able to do so using a Random Forest Model. I prepared a R presentation slideshow and decided that an appropriate way to present was to briefly explain how decision trees and Random Forests worked. To do this I built a custom data set of shapes, and created visualizations that walked through a decision tree, showing how at each split entropy decreased. I then explained to them how a Random Forest consisted of hundreds of decision trees built from samples of the object data. I created a few visualizations of the results of my random forest, and was excited to share them with my superiors.

Into The Fish Bowl

On the date and time appointed, I jaunted to the fish bowl, with an earnest excitement to present. I set up my presentation on the projector while the executive team filtered in. After a short introduction, I began to talk through my slides. I was extremely happy when I was able to turn my presentation into a discussion. People began to ask me questions, and in explaining, I was able to help illustrate successfully the power of the model I had created, and what kinds of things would be valuable moving forward. I felt like my time in the fish bowl allowed me to grow from the wonderful advantage of being observed. Now as I continue my work I have new goals, and a new direction, as well as a heightened level of confidence, knowing that I was comfortable with being questioned. Perhaps having a fish, if not only for the reminder of the importance of being examined, wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all.