I’m not on social media, but I promise I’m a real person. The fact that I don’t use Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, or any other social networking site may say something about my age and disposition. More about my disposition I would guess. I can still be reached, though! You can , and I promise I will promptly respond.
I’ve had many lives already. After college, I taught math at inner-city high schools in Los Angeles, then rode the first tech wave in Silicon Valley developing rapid prototypes and front-end frameworks for Hotmail and other start-ups. In San Francisco, as I coded in the evenings and wrote fiction in the days, I decided to return to school for what I thought was a second bachelor’s. That foray into exciting new ideas and ways of thinking turned into a Cultural Studies Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. I’m not sure it was the best decision, but one thing is certain, writing my dissertation was transformative. Finishing it meant surrendering to the writing process, letting it reveal its own answers. I did not know I was going to write what I did. I was surprised, almost shocked, at every page.
After a bit of teaching and writing, I’m returning to my first love—numbers. I’m picking up where I left off, coding apps, this time trying to understand probability and statistics. When I returned to school in San Francisco, all I wanted was a path to a think tank with a numbers department. The Ph.D. was a diversion I couldn’t resist as the allure of ideas captured me. I’ve recently taught myself some R, Rmarkdown, and Shiny. I’m looking for an opportunity to contribute to a numbers team focusing on critical social issues.
2022 Ingrid Lagos