Shanikwa Haynes (Nikki)

I started in criminal justice. Not because I didn't love numbers — I always loved numbers — but because that's where I thought I was headed. At some point the path bent. I found accounting. Then I found data. Then I found that the two things I cared about most were the same thing: making sense of what's actually happening, with whatever information you have.

I completed a Bachelor's in Accounting at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, earned VITA certification as a volunteer tax preparer, and then kept going — enrolling in Western Governors University's Master of Science in Data Analytics program, where I worked through eleven courses covering SQL, Python, R, Tableau, machine learning, and a full data science capstone.

Along the way, I started writing about what I was learning — and about the Bible, which kept showing up in my data work in ways I hadn't expected. The letter is where those two things meet. It's for people like me: career-changers, accountants who are curious about code, analysts who still believe the work means something.