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 an on-again-off-again book worm. Learn more on my personal website, samanthacsik.github.io.

👩‍🏫 We are constantly iterating on how we deliver content across UCSB's MEDS program. This year, I'm excited to partnering with our incredible Career Services team to co-lead a year-long Career & Professional Development Workshop Series. These weekly sessions expand on both my previous work offering portfolio-building instruction and the Career Team's established career development programming. With so much complementary expertise, I'm stoked to formally join forces to offer MEDS students a more integrated professional development experience.

🌱 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. We always have a call out for folks interested in leading or co-leading an event, and are also looking to welcome new co-organizers onto the leadership team. Please reach out if you're interested!

🥾 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! I've also built a Strava dashboard to make my map a bit more interactive and add in some additional fun data viz. It's a fun side project to iterate on, when time allows. 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!