About

Hi, my name is Marcel!

I am an Austro-Iranian Economist and grew up in the Alps drinking tea. Throughout my diploma studies (during which the term data scientist was not yet well established/known) I made my fateful encounter with Econometrics¹ after which one thing led to the other: I caught fire and dived into the subject in the course of a Master's program in Applied Economics which soon brought me in contact with R² and at the same time taught me the beauty of programming.

While I never really understood the value of blogging, in a recent job interview for a position as an analyst I was asked if I could show some stuff I was working on. And because I could not (apart from two³ articles that I co-authored), I became aware of the purpose of a dedicated online portfolio⁴.

The last missing puzzle piece that finally made me sit down and create a blog was an article published on R-bloggers by David Robinson which originally appeared on his own blog on varianceexplained.org. The argument was convincing: blogging can foster your own learning-path and journey throughout topics of your own interest. And by writing and publishing something you make sure to research to your best knowledge about a certain topic. At the same time you expose yourself to a huge community through which you can connect to peers and receive valuable feedback.

This blog is hence dedicated to my journey through all things economics, data (using primarily R and Python) as well as programming more general.

In My Spare Time

Besides my work and all of the above, I'm a passionate musician. I play the piano and make music in various bands/projects which means also writing songs and beaing creative as an artist. I take the liberty to also publish some music on this blog as soon as I have decided for a good way to do so.