My friend just left his job as a data analyst for ethical reasons.  He's looking for another job working with LLMs in NYC, but is concerned with ageism, nonlinear trajectory, limited 'official' experience with LLMs, fierce competition in NYC.  His long term goal is to work with genAI and do engineering.  He has to start in NYC.  Within a year or two, he's planning to moving to the Bay Area.  He's willing to build up portfolio/skills/professional network for a few months and is planning to go to NeurIPS.  What concrete steps do you suggest my friend take within the next 3 months? Within the next year?  He also has a very clear idea of an AI in education startup and how to build the pieces, which may also help fill in the employment gaps and give context for his work.  Given the situation on the job market and wanting to start the company for some time, he is still undecided between pursuing this full time and seeking full time imployment.  What do you think? His resume is below:
SKILLS
● Coding Skills: Python, PyTorch, PySpark, SQL, R, Excel, Tableau, Java, JavaScript, git, Docker, Airflow, GCP
● Data Science Skills: LLMs, Machine Learning, Data Visualization, Data Analytics, Statistical Modeling
● Languages: Spanish, Russian, French

LS DIRECT MARKETING, Data Analyst
Suffern, NY
● Streamlined and refactored critical sections of the code base, resulting in a 10x speedup in execution time for
frequently utilized programs (Python/SQL/GCP).
● Developed a Python/SQL dashboard for one of the company’s largest clients and co-developed dashboards
adapted by the entire team, contributing to $2M/year of new revenue due to improved tracking capabilities.
● Collaborated with data science teams to refine machine learning algorithms in R, resulting in a 35%
improvement in model performance; this enhancement directly influenced strategic business decisions, boosting
overall company revenue by $3M/year.
● Built an LLM assistant using exllamav2 6.0bpw quantization of Mixtral-8x7B, demonstrating the use of prompt
engineering and RAG to achieve a daily average time savings of 30% for over 45 employees (public version:
arXiv-llms-assistant).
NEW YORK CITY DATA SCIENCE ACADEMY, Data Science Fellow
New York, NY
● Pinpointed the most profitable student housing properties (6%+ cap rate) through analysis of real estate studies,
leveraging linear regression, tree-based models (decision trees, XGBoost), and deploying a Streamlit app.
● Optimized a bank's marketing campaign involving highly imbalanced data by rebalancing the data set and
building random forests in R to identify immediate $55K savings per 100K contacts and enhancing brand
reputation.
● Detected housing market anomalies with returns of over $100K/property in Georgia for Haystacks.ai by building
a robust web scraping solution using Python/GCP and co-developing novel agglomerative clustering techniques.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, Coding Associate
New York, NY
● Collaborated in optimizing finance-related code via algorithmic improvements in numpy and pandas, increasing
runtime speeds by 100x.
LAKE MARY HIGH SCHOOL, AP Computer Science and Statistics Teacher
Lake Mary, FL
● Created and executed a robust AP Computer Science curriculum centered on Java and JavaScript, emphasizing
advanced OOP and algorithmic concepts; the curriculum led to a 50% improvement in student AP 5/5 score
outcomes.
● Founded the first high school weekly deep learning club, introducing students to machine learning with
PyTorch/Linux/Python (from basic numpy to CNNs).
VANDEN HIGH SCHOOL, Mathematics Teacher
Fairfield, CA
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS, Graduate Assistant (Economics)
Davis, CA
● Conducted research in the theory of experimentation and taught advanced statistical methods in R, performing in
the top 10% of graduate students.
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA, Research Assistant (Mathematics)
Orlando, FL
● Led a team of advanced undergraduates in NSF-funded computer vision (ML) research, contributing to 8%
improvement in face recognition accuracy.
EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT DAVIS, MASTER OF ARTS IN ECONOMICSDavis, CA
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA, MASTER OF SCIENCE IN MATHEMATICSOrlando, FL
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA, MASTER OF SCIENCE IN ECONOMICSOrlando, FL
UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA, BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN MATHEMATICSOrlando, FL
OTHER
● Memberships: fastai cluster-of-stars reading group, meeting weekly to focus on advances in LLMs (2022-Present)
● Publication: Comparative Statics Of A Monopolistic Firm Facing Rate-Of-Return And
Command-And-Control Pollution Constraints. Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell. 2014.
● Certifications: Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning and Deep Learning Certifications; Coursera MLOps Specialization
(Docker); Practical Deep Learning for Coders (machine learning, computer vision, fastai); Big Data with PySpark; Natural
Language Processing with Python; Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer