Marc-Henri Aka
We talked to Marc-Henri Aka from his apartment in San Francisco. Originally from the Côte d’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, on the southern coast of West Africa, Marc moved to San Francisco in 2016 when he was 20. He’s now working as a volunteer data quality engineer with SCORES Labs.
How did you end up moving more than 7000 miles away to go to college?
I came to San Francisco because it’s very tech-oriented with lots of innovation going on. I come from a French system of education, and I thought I might need a foundation in the American education system. I chose community college to start. It’s affordable and another way to get where you want to go.
I started at City College of San Francisco and then transferred to San Francisco State. In 2021, I earned a BA in Business Administration with a concentration in Decision Science (which is basically data analytics) and a minor in Information Systems. Essentially I learned about data and the infrastructure and tools that go along with it. That’s why I’m able to do the work that I’m doing now at SCORES.
You knew very little English when you moved here? How did you pull that off?
Before I moved to San Francisco, I lived in England for a year and took English classes. My writing was ok, but my speaking wasn’t very good. I had learned a little English back home, but couldn’t even put a sentence together. I was better at Spanish because it’s more similar to French, with Latin roots. Then after that year, I went back home and was back speaking French for the next five months. So when I came to the US, my speaking was still pretty rusty.
At City College, I was able to take some mathematics classes and science classes to understand how they’re approached here, and they were obviously taught in English.
Now I definitely think in English. That was another goal of mine. Before I moved here. I changed my computer and every device I had in English, so I’d be dealing with English all the time.
How did you get connected with SCORES?
As an international student, I had some constraints in getting hired as an intern, because companies will need to sponsor you for any later offer of full-time work, and that can be complicated.
After graduation, I did a lot of interviews, but I didn’t have a job. So I thought, why not use the skills I had learned from university and apply them to real life? That’s why I decided to volunteer. When I was looking around for an organization to volunteer, I discovered SCORES. I loved how SCORES was creating a positive influence in kids’ lives. So I reached out. Then, Pete Swearengen, American SCORES Bay Area CTO, sent me an email saying he was open to someone volunteering in tech. I started with SCORES Labs as a data quality engineer in August of 2021.
What kind of work are you doing with SCORES?
At SCORES, we’re working with student and coach participation data, which is housed in a Salesforce database. I’ve been using tools like Workbench’s SOQL and Google Sheets for data engineering. My work includes matching, creating, updating, and removing records.
With SCORES, each season, you need to save all enrolled students in the database. That may involve creating a new record or updating existing records. Sometimes we get data on students from a school’s database, which we then need to check against existing data in our database.
You have to be careful with the data. You have to make sure you have the right student and the right record, and you need to avoid data problems such as duplicates or data inconsistency. You might find the same student with different information if they originally came into SCORES through a different afterschool program. Or an old record might have a missing middle name or a spelling error. The student might have switched schools. Or you might have two students with the same name and need to find attributes to distinguish them. That’s where things like unique identifier data like student ID and birthdate come into play. You also look for gaps in the information.
Beyond that, you have to be able to understand the structure of the database. There’s a lot going on within the data. Accurate, high-quality data sets can be useful for studying how the program is doing. You want to know about the percentages of students who are returning and the percentage who are not, and based on that, try to make some adjustments to make the overall program even better. I’m not doing this kind of data analytics now, but it’s an area I want to explore.
Beyond the work you’re currently doing with SCORES, are there other things you want to explore and experiment with?
My goal when I first started to work with SCORES was to better understand the database structure. Once I understood that I got interested in actually studying the data, through more advanced data analytics tools. Tableau interests me for its data visualization possibilities — I watch videos to better understand how it works.
Machine learning and statistical learning with Python and R analytics also interest me – I need some mentorship with these. I want to find a way to help with all the skills I’m developing.
I think companies look at your resumé and notice if you’ve been doing something interesting. Getting experience is a plus. And when I say experience, I mean working with other people; it’s not just about working by yourself. Sometimes you need to work in teams, you have to meet deadlines. Companies want to see that you’ve put yourself in positions where people rely on you. Those are critical soft skills.
You’re a soccer player. Tell us your soccer story.
I’m very passionate about soccer. I’ve been playing since I was a little kid – since I was in my mother’s belly, kicking! I played in the neighborhood and on a school team. We played every Saturday. I had dreams of becoming a professional soccer player. The field we played on was a pretty weird shape - not even a rectangle - but as long as we had a ball, we could play and nourish that dream.
Where I come from in West Africa, there are a lot of problems with infrastructure. So when I came here and looked at the beautiful green fields, it looked like the dream was right here. You feel like you have a real chance of becoming a soccer player. When you play on a pitch and the middle is sand and the sides are sunken, it can be hard to see a future in it. But passion will carry you places.
Today, that passion is still alive. I am still playing soccer, and I am working with an organization that believes in the power of soccer. It is interesting how a ball could bring us together. In my years abroad, I have played with people coming from different parts of the globe. Some spoke English or French, and some did not know how to speak either of those languages, but we all spoke soccer/football. Even without talking, we understand each other. We shared laughter and joy.