As the first Mexican woman to get a PhD from Stanford, Debbie Berebichez has experienced what it takes to challenge norms and boundaries. She speaks about her personal experience overcoming cultural norms regarding women in STEM and her professional experience training company culture in data science.   Debbie Berebichez: It’s very important to encourage people to be evidence based. To see, okay, if you have a new idea for business, search for the metrics that are going to tell you that that idea may work or why it may not work, but set those parameters beforehand. Ginette: I’m Ginette, Curtis: and I’m Curtis, Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch, Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world. Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics, training, and consulting company. Up until this month, Debbie Berebichez was Metis’s chief data scientist. We talk with her about her journey into STEM and her perspectives on data science. Debbie: Thank you for inviting me, Curtis. I love your Data Crunch Podcast, and it’s an honor for me to be here. I have kind of a unique story in that I was born in Mexico City, and I grew up in a fairly conservative community that discouraged girls from pursuing careers in STEM and specifically in science and math. And I was a very curious child. I, I asked a lot of questions, and I wanted to know things about the world and, and understand about the planets and how things work and growing up in a community like that, you know, it was cherished, but at a certain point when it came time to go to college, my teachers in school, as well as the counselors and my friends, including my parents, they were like, “no, you probably should pick a more feminine career, something easier.” My mother told me, be careful. Don’t tell boys that you like math ’cause you may end up not being able to get married, which almost happened. But, uh, it really, it was just a thing that I had to hide. And with that came a lot of insecurity because I just thought I’m not good enough in math and these topics, and, and I will never, never be able to do it. Until the day came to go to college, and my advisors in school had said, “you know, what, why don’t you study philosophy?” The funny thing is during high school, when people were doing their crazy rascal things and whatnot, I was actually getting books from the library about obscure physicists, like Tycho Brahe, and reading about how they were locked up in a tower or an observatory, and I thought to myself, “you know, maybe I’ll be like them. Maybe I’ll be locked up in, in some tower and alone, and, and, you know, not be a very sociable person. However, I’ll have my science and my observations with me, and that made me happy.” And so I grew up like that. And so when I had to decide to go to college, someone said, “you know, philosophy also studies several people and what their, their ideas about life are, and they’re very curious.” So I said, “okay, fine.” That, that appeased everyone around me. And I started studying philosophy. Two years in, my hunger to know about the world and the universe was louder than ever, and it was not going to go away. So I decided to apply behind everyone’s back to schools in the US, because I had learned that in the US, you can do a double major and study more than one topic, which I couldn’t do in Mexico, but I was afraid because my parents couldn’t pay an American University when we were paying an eighth of that in Mexico City for a pr...