952: How to Avoid Burnout and Get Promoted, with “The Fit Data Scientist” Penelope Lafeuille

0:00Jon Krohn:Feeling burnt out or looking to get promoted? Today's episode is packed with tips on how to thrive at work. Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Krohn. Today's guest is Penelope LaFeuille, a senior data scientist at Metadata Solutions, who's also known as the Fit Data Scientist for her practical content on how to balance fitness, nutrition, and rest with work and play to make you maximally productive without burnout and to help you land that promotion. This episode features all her best tips. Enjoy.

0:34Jon Krohn:Penelope, welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. It is a treat to have you on the show. Where are you calling in from? I'm in sunny San Diego. It's currently not any cloud outside, and I'm wearing a T-shirt. Very, very nice. I have had guests from San Diego on the show before, and my understanding from them is that it is the best climate in the United States all year round. So I'm jealous that you live there and especially this week, because at the time of recording, it is NeurIPS in San Diego. I should be there. I should be enjoying the warm sunshine, but I'm freezing my butt off in New York.

1:13Jon Krohn:Okay. So Penelope, the reason why you're on the show is because you wrote a LinkedIn post about the show. And so first of all, for any listeners out there wondering how to get on the podcast, I mean, so we get hundreds of requests for people to be on the show every month. But every once in a while, you know, somebody makes an original post that really catches my eye. And I think, Hey, you know, we got to get this person on the show. And Penelope did that. So I'm going to include this post in the show notes so people can check it out. but basically you wrote, I listened to 20 plus, I've listened to 20 plus data science podcasts over the past five years.

1:57Jon Krohn:These are the three that I keep coming back to. And the first one, and I'm going to assume not accidentally the first one is the super data science podcast. And, uh, yeah, you said it makes machine learning ideas feel simple. Every episode feels like a mini masterclass, top researchers and practitioners. And then you mentioned, I should also mention the other podcasts that you brought up, which are also great. So Data Framed by Data Camp was your second one. And then Gradient Descent by Weights and Biases was your third. And Gradient Descent, I realize I'm talking way too much, but Gradient Descent has such a great name.

2:32Jon Krohn:There are so many machine learning podcasts out there with brilliant names. Gradient Descent is one of the best. And I wish that we had a funny podcast name, but anyway, we've got a bombastic one. Yeah. So Penelope, I don't know if you, I don't know, like what compelled you to write this particular post? You do create a fair bit of content on LinkedIn and more recently Instagram. But yeah, so like what kind of, how do you decide what you're going to create and post? So for this specific post, it was because I feel that lately has been a lot around sharing like cheat sheets and lists of books. And we are not really sure that people are actually using those sheets and reading those books.

3:14And so I wanted to create a post that was a little bit of, I'm a bit fed up of all those things that people are posting without actually listening and taking action. So I wanted to be a little bit more personal saying, those are the three podcasts that I actually listen to. And the reason why I mentioned your podcast is that I love that it blends both the technical aspect of data science, of being a data scientist, as well as more an applicable aspect and a product-oriented and user-oriented aspect that I really love because being a data scientist is not only about coding, but it's also about coding in order to solve a particular problem for a specific person.

4:00Jon Krohn:Yeah, cool. That is what I try to do is to try to make things applied to kind of have you thinking even in the Friday, the short Friday episodes that I do on my own. I try to have kind of like a takeaway of like, even if this is a different industry, what could you be doing in yours? What lessons can you take from what we've learned in this episode? So that's cool. I'm glad to hear that that's working out. And we were actually speaking of applicability and kind of product mindset before we started recording, you and I were talking about a particular episode of the show that you liked that recently came out as episode number 937 with Mark Dupuis, who is a co-founder of a company called Fabi.ai.

4:40Jon Krohn:And Fabi stands for Fast Business Intelligence. So it's a platform that makes getting business insights easy for coders and non-coders alike. And yeah, you mentioned that you particularly really liked that one. What did you like about it? So for this one, it's because I'm on the quoting side of things, but I want to learn more about the business side of things. To know what, I mean, I'm quoting, but what is my quote even used for? And so having companies like that, who just build something that bridges the gap between people who are technical, but don't really know a lot about the business side and people who are more on the business side, but don't know a lot about the technical side is actually amazing.

5:24And to give a very concrete example, I recently started writing online, I would say like one or two years ago, and it would not have been possible if I did not have tools such as ChatGPT and Claude now, just because I'm French, I'm writing in English, I know what I want to write about, but having those tools that kind of helped me a little bit to move across the pressure that I had about like being perfect, knowing that I need to have everything writing down on my own. Having those tools is really useful. And I'm not writing all my posts with ChatGPT. I'm editing them quite a bit, but it just like gives me the nudge to actually jump beyond the I'm scared of doing it.

6:09Jon Krohn:That's the way to go. I mean, your English is perfect as far as I can tell, but I could see how you know, it makes it easier. It makes it, it makes it easy to feel confident that you're writing posts that are, you know, grammatically perfect. If you have these LLMs as a tool to support you. And yeah. So speaking of which it was specifically, so it wasn't just that you wrote a post about the podcast. I wish you, I wish I had enough guest slots that I could just, anytime somebody wrote about the show, I'd be like, do you want to come on? But, uh, the thing that caught my eyes. So then I went to your profile and your headline on LinkedIn says from burnt out data scientist to$180 ,000 plus and promoted while building a strong body and mind.

6:55Jon Krohn:So, uh, and actually it continues to go on. It's a, it's a pretty long LinkedIn headline, but it goes on to say data science and analytics, science backed productivity. And I really like all of those ideas. It seems like it's allowed you to grow a following pretty quickly. You've got a newsletter that we'll have a link to on Substack that you provide a link to prominently at the top of your profile. And you also seem to be doing stuff on Instagram, maybe targeting a slightly, I don't know how you're targeting differently. But yeah, maybe tell us about the beginning of this. Tell us about how you were a burnt out scientist and how you turned things around.

7:40Yes, I was working in finance in New York right after my master's degree. And even if I was good at what I was doing, I think that the fact that I was burnt out came from two different aspects. The first one, I was working too much. And the second one, what I was doing was not really aligned with the direction I wanted my career to grow. And so when I was waking up every morning thinking about how do I see myself in five years, there was a huge disconnect between what I was doing and what I wanted to be doing in five years. And that's when I decided to change careers and to switch from finance.

8:22I was still doing data science for finance, but doing data science more in the life science industry, because this is the industry I'm genuinely passionate about. Just like studying the human body and using this technical knowledge in order to create new drugs, develop clinical trials, and so on. That was the first point. And then the second point was about I'm not going to be successful at being a data scientist working in the life science industry if I am not taking care of my body myself. So that's when I hired a lifestyle and fitness coach. And when I started working out pretty regularly, taking care of my nutrition, as well as my recovery with like sleeping recovery practices and so on.

9:08And that's how I was able to very clearly do a 180 in both my career and my personal life at the same time.

9:17Jon Krohn:Fantastic. Were you into fitness before getting this fitness and lifestyle coach or was that something new? So I was, but I was not doing the right things. meaning that I was also burnt out in my fitness. Because outside of my job, I wanted to have something that I was looking forward to. So I was working out nearly every single day and I was very clearly overtrained. I was not feeling my body properly. So everything was completely out of whack, to be honest. Yeah, this probably happens to a lot of the kinds of people that listen to this podcast who are not only pursuing a career in data science or AI in some way, you're also listening to a podcast about it in your free time probably.

10:05Jon Krohn:And so you're probably the kind of person that is trying to maximize everything all the time. And so I certainly, with my workouts, I very, very often tend to overdo it, training too many days in the week, too hard on a given day, yeah not taking enough rest days um yeah and just kind of having the level of intensity too high on a regular basis and so kind of instead of fitness being something that rejuvenates me it is often something that just wears me out even more and then i'm kind of like you know on the worst days it's like i keep feeling like i just need to nap and it's like uh you know just sitting at my desk feels like, you know, it's too hard.

10:47Yeah.

10:48Jon Krohn:So what kind of, how do you strike that balance? How do you, how do you design a program that is going to make you feel rejuvenated? How do you structure that? So working with my coach, we were looking at what's my work schedule and also what are the activities that I'm doing outside of the gym that also give me energy and I, that I don't want to sacrifice. So for me, for instance, I play a lot of pickleball going to play in tournaments and so on. So I still want to have this background. What is that game called in French? We don't have it. It's too lowbrow, too American. Le pickle. Yeah, that would be weird in French.

11:36I don't know.

11:37Jon Krohn:I saw I actually I recently saw there's a I've lately I've been working out at this lifetime gym in in central Manhattan called it's a Penn Station location and they have tons of pickleball courts. And in fact, if you it's impossible, you can't pickleball is so popular and there's so few nice places that you can do it in Manhattan that there is a waiting list. Like I'm already a member and I pay a crazy membership fee already, but I can't access the pickleball courts. If I want to access them, I do want to access them. So I'm on a waiting list to hopefully someday get an invitation. And then if I get that, I have to pay a fee, a huge fee, hundreds of dollars.

12:20Jon Krohn:Plus my membership goes even higher just to have access to these pickleball courts. But the whole reason why I'm saying this is that the other day I saw a woman in there who was wearing a t-shirt. She was playing pickleball and it said, the pickle. So I don't know. Maybe that's what French people say. But yeah, so anyway, so pickleball, you do a lot of pickleball. That's nice. It is pretty rejuvenating. Yeah, absolutely. And it's also a great way to meet people, which is another point about rest and recovery, which is that it's also a lot about the people that you're surrounding yourself with.

12:54Because hanging out with people who want to go out every night or every weekend, And spoiler alert, there is a very high likelihood that you're not going to be able to recover and to sleep well. By all means, I do go out and I do drink, but it's all about striking that balance and surrounding yourself with people and activities that you enjoy doing together beyond just going to the bar or going to the restaurant, even if we are doing it afterwards, after playing pickleball.

13:22Jon Krohn:Nice. And you're French, so you must smoke regularly, right? No, I don't. A bit of a stereotype. It was something that was like, I don't know if this is true, but apparently up until like the 1980s, like the men's national football team, the soccer team would like have a, would smoke at like halftime. I would not be surprised. So that's, that's helpful to help us understand. So you basically, you set up a schedule, a fitness schedule that's based on work, that's based on your social schedule. It kind of sounds like that means that, does that mean that you need to be in a really rigid routine or is there some flexibility as well?

14:00Both actually, meaning that I still want to be able to go to the gym four times a week, just because I know that it's good, not only for my physical health, if I want to build or even to just maintain the muscle that I have, but also for my mental health. I typically go right after work. I work New York time and I'm on the West coast so it's typically in the middle of the afternoon which is good because there are not that many people at the gym and so it's a good break between my professional life and my personal life because then when I go out of the gym my friends are also out of work and so I can go hang out with them or even go play pickleball so it's I know that I'm going to be working out four times per week, usually Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, but it's not super rigid.

14:55I just want to get those four times per week in.

14:57Jon Krohn:Excellent. And so how does nutrition fit into this? Because you mentioned that that's part of the change that you made as well. So in addition to kind of having this balanced fitness structure, what are your key tips for refueling for your job? Yes, I would say the main two tips are around eating enough protein. So I try to have one gram of protein per pound of body weight, just because as I'm working out, I want my muscle to have the right amount of protein in order to be able to grow or just maintain them and also for recovery. And the second one is about timing my carbs the right way, meaning that I don't want to have a huge glucose spike when I'm in the middle of my work session and then I just want to go nap.

15:48So what I do is like, usually I have most of my carbs in the forms of either like rice, potatoes, fruits, sometimes ice cream, mostly like around my workouts before, during, and after, because it's the prime time for your body to absorb those carbs the right way without feeling sluggish afterwards.

16:10Jon Krohn:Got it. So ice cream before, during, and after working out is the key to being a successful data scientist. I love that. And you also, you mentioned to me when I asked you before we started recording about kind of your top tips related to avoiding burnout as a data scientist, you said that rest is the most important thing. Is there anything you want to dive into on that? Absolutely. I would say more specifically around sleep. I try to have at least eight hours of sleep, which means actually more than eight hours in bed. It's more or less, I would say, 8.39 just because I love reading before bed to downregulate a little bit because if you're swiping or on your computer, there is no way you're going to be able to fall asleep.

16:57and it's also about the quality of the sleep that you have it's not only about eight hours but eight hours of quality sleep with deep sleep REM sleep to just for your brain and the best way to have it is also to be able to down regulate and not be stressed during the day and for me it comes in the forms of just going on walks outside even just a five minutes walk in between meetings to kind of shift my brain a little bit instead of being always in the go, go, go mode. And, um, and instead of swiping on Instagram, I just go on walks without my phone. Sometimes I forget my keys and I'm locked outside.

17:41And, uh, and so just going on walks outside and helping me not only focus for my meetings afterwards on my work session, but also telling my body that you can downregulate in five minutes, which then is a good way to fall asleep faster and to avoid waking up in the middle of the night if you're too stressed during the day.

18:04Jon Krohn:All that makes perfect sense to me. Such sensible advice. And hopefully a lot of our listeners are doing it or can do it. Being in bed for longer than eight hours like that, like eight and a half, nine hours, so that you can hopefully get actually seven and a half, eight hours of sleep, because there is always a wake time, whether you remember it or not. But if you wear like a whoop or an Apple watch or whatever, a Fitbit to bed, you'll see that there's chunks of time that you were awake, even if you don't remember it. So that is really important. And yeah, things like reading before bed, definitely getting away from your phone, getting away from screens.

18:40Jon Krohn:I'm not as good as good at it as I should be, but I definitely get the message and hopefully someday I'll be really good at avoiding. I do. I turn off my phone. before I go to bed. And yeah, the nights that I have enough energy, I read in bed as well. It was definitely my best night's sleeps. And yeah, of course, if you have stress during the day, that for me, it'll either like, it'll kind of run through my mind as I'm trying to fall asleep at the end of the day, or waking up in the middle of the night and I can't fall back asleep. And it's interesting how in the middle of the night, those stressful things that might in waking life actually seem not that bad and surmountable.

19:21Jon Krohn:Somehow when I'm laying there in bed, they turn into like these big crises. Absolutely. And I'm the exact same way. And that's why also right before bed, I just have a five minute routine when I take my notebook and a pen and I just write down everything that I have in my mind. It's kind of my way of telling my brain, okay, just forget this for the next nine hours and we can get to that tomorrow morning because it's written down. You don't have to think about it. And it's actually a pretty useful tip, I think, because also the next morning, you know which tasks you need to tackle because you've already written them on a piece of paper.

20:04Jon Krohn:Great idea. I love that. I should do that. All right. So we've now talked about kind of the content that you write about, how you, you know, got from being a printout data scientist to now having a strong body and mind and flourishing as a professional, as a professional data scientist specifically, let's talk a bit about the data science that you do. So you're a senior data scientist at a company called MediData Solutions, not metadata, but like medical data, MediData. So yeah, tell us about what MediData does and what you do as a senior data scientist there. So I've been working at MediData for four years now.

20:45And what this company does is that it creates a software that pharmaceutical companies can use in order to run their clinical trials and to analyze the data from their clinical trials. When I started working there, I was focused more specifically on immuno-oncology treatment, meaning using your immune cells in order to direct them towards the cancer cells and hopefully be cured of cancer. And so what I'm currently working on is designing more like the back-end data science of those softwares that pharmaceutical companies can use versus what I started working on when I just joined was more the afterwards, meaning like the analytical side of things.

21:35Once we have the data, how can we analyze them in order to have better insights for future clinical trials? So it's kind of an input-output kind of situation where I'm more focused on the input now and the software that is used in order to acquire the input versus at the beginning working more on the output.

21:55Jon Krohn:Fantastic. Is there anything that you can go into a little bit of detail on, like technically? Like I totally understand if you can't, but you know, like what maybe programming languages you use or what kinds of techniques you use regularly? Absolutely. So I'm currently working on the team that uses both R and Python, which is interesting because I do have more like a statistical slash math background. So I actually love using R. I know that it's not a very popular tool to use among data scientists. You can say it. I was doing R for a decade before I got into Python. So I totally understand. It does feel especially like, and I'm similarly, everything that I see in the world professionally, personally, is kind of from a statistics mindset.

22:41Jon Krohn:And the way that R is set up, I realize that Python people will say things like it's not even a real programming language. but for doing statistics, for working with data, for doing plots even still today relative to Python, there's all kinds of things that you can do well in R. So you don't have to be shy about your enthusiasm for R. Yeah, and I feel that it's specifically relevant working in the life science industry, which is a lot of like biostatistics and so on. and actually like biostatisticians are using R more than Python. But I also do love Python just because then you can actually like build more like a product around Python when R is more around the math and the statistics that you can have behind it.

23:34Jon Krohn:For sure. All right. And then kind of my last technical question for you here, or, you know, a question about your career. so you grew up in France as people can probably tell by your accent um and it's kind of crazy for me to see that you I kind of it's interesting how I just have such a poor sense of you know I kind of as we've been talking here this whole time I kind of have this sense that like you're my peer and we're probably probably about the same age but according to your LinkedIn profile you started elementary school while I was already in university. So there is a bit of an age difference here.

24:13Jon Krohn:But yes, you did a high school and your first degrees in France, including a diploma in engineering, a master of science in engineering at Centrale-Supel-Lec with a 4.0 GPA. Congratulations. And as you said, you know, lots of mathematics courses, statistics, programming, optimization, economics. And then that led you, it seems, directly into a master's at Columbia University in New York. And that degree, that master's is in something that I'm pretty sure nobody on the show has ever had this particular master's before. It's management science and engineering. Management science and engineering, MSNE.