Professionally, I'm a data science educator supporting UC Santa Barbara's Master of Environmental Data Science (MEDS) program. I love teaching data science skills, learning and implementing inclusive pedagogical approaches, and the communities that support both of those things. Outside of work, I’m an avid hiker (find my best attempt at creating my own "octohiker", below), novice (but passionate) meal-maker, and I really love the color green. Learn more on my personal website, samanthacsik.github.io.

👩‍🏫 I'm currently developing a new course, Data science tools for building professional online portfolios (Fall 2024), as part of UCSB's MEDS program. It'll focus on developing a polished online presence for showcasing your skills, projects, expertise, and of course, personality. Check out the evolving course website as I iterate on materials leading up to fall quarter.

🌱 I'm continuouly developing and iterating on data science trainings and workshops to supplement the MEDS curricula. All materials are open source, which you can check out on the MEDS GitHub Organization.

💜 In my spare time I'm also co-organizer for R-Ladies Santa Barbara -- stay tuned for upcoming events by joining our Meetup Group. Past event materials can be found on our GitHub repo. Please reach out if you're interested in leading or co-leading an event!

🥾 My absolute favorite activity is spending time on the trails hiking with my pup, Tallie. I finally got around to scraping my Strava data using the {rStrava} package and created a heatmap of my activities using leaflet -- check it out on my personal website! More recently, I've embarked on building a Strava dashboard to make my map a bit more interactive and also add in some additional fun data viz. It's a work in progress, but feel free to poke around. Find the code for the map and dashboard on my strava-dashboard repo.

✍️ I wrote up a reflection (of sorts) after I finished teaching my first ever 4-unit course, Data Visualization & Communication, in winter 2024. You can read about what it was like to build and teach a graduate-level data science course on my blog!