ALUMNI HONORS
THE DATA CHIEF : Ask DJ Patil the superpower behind data ? People .
A lot of people took chances on DJ Patil ’ 96 — from the UC San Diego admissions office who accepted his appeal to an initial rejection , to President Obama , who made him our country ’ s first-ever chief data scientist . And while these achievements bookend a career that includes a hotlist of Silicon Valley companies , Patil is quick to note that the most impact is yet to come , and will come from those we choose to take chances on as well .
On choosing UC San Diego : “ I appealed to get into UCSD , and when you fight for it , you realize that it ’ s really a privilege to be on that campus . I came in with a really good idea of what I wanted to do — I wanted to get the tools required to understand and study really , really hard concepts . And those concepts , most often , were rooted in things like chaos theory , and using chaos theory to understand the nature of how the world works and operates . Now , is that computer science ? Is it physics ? Is it math ? It kind of requires all of it .
And that brings up the most powerful thing about UCSD — that majors aren ’ t tied to the college . So I could take anything and everything I could . Here I am a math person , a computer science person , a physics kind of person , and because I was at Warren I could take psychology and theater . You exercise skills that you never otherwise get to learn and you get to dabble so much . My approach was always , ‘ Take as many classes as you can .’ Because when else in life do you have such an opportunity to try things ? That ’ s college — UCSD is permission to try .”
On how his education carries forth : “ One of the most important things that UCSD gave me , that I used in the White House , is an understanding of the Chicano and Latino community . Because some of my closest friends were from that community . Some of them had parents who were illegal immigrants , and I got to see that world and experience it in a way that was different . And that experience was valuable to really know what we mean when we talk about “ stats .” We put “ stats ” up there all the time , but we often don ’ t understand who those stats are . Is it Juan ? Is it Giselle ? Is it Sam ? Is it Julie ?
We don ’ t put names next to them , so we don ’ t tell their stories . And so it ’ s very easy to be dismissive or say that it ’ s just a factoid .
But when you actually start to experience who that factoid represents — the people it represents — it changes your perspective . It changes the way you look at the world . It ’ s one of the reasons I ’ ll often say : people are always greater than data . You have to understand who is being impacted . Without people , data doesn ’ t mean much .”
On empowering others : “ I ’ ve come to the realization that I ’ m not going to be the person who ’ s actually going to solve a lot of problems . Largely because I ’ m smart , but I ’ m not that smart . But what I can do is make it a hundred thousand times easier for the next person to come along to get to the next solution . If I spend all my energy breaking down obstacles and barriers , and removing the pain that someone — or a whole nation of people — have to work on something , they ’ ll figure it out .
61 TRITON | SPRING 2017