I’m sure everyone questions themselves when joining a new field of study. Data Scientist isn’t exactly where I saw myself when asking the age old question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. I wanted to be a baseball player. But then reality kicked in, and so did genetics, pretty much securing my future in something other than sports. I have always had a voracious appetite for knowledge, doing well in math and science also helped which led me to pursue an engineering degree. I wanted to know how things worked, what makes them work and how I could fix or improve them. It was something I had hoped would propel me into the future, a job that could stand the test of time. I was brought back to reality when I entered the workforce, I was in a job that was stuck in the past. “Programming is the future of the workforce”, this is the catalyst that would set me on my current goal of a future in data science.
I have always wanted to find a way to get into a career that made use of computer programming. I have taken three years of computer science in high school but that was ages ago. It left an impression in me that this might be something I would want to look into in the future. I had seen how rewarding jobs in programming can be but I had still had no idea how to get into it. I looked into coding boot camps for software engineering but a new program in data science had piqued my interest. I had talked to some friends about programming and data science came up often. I got some good advice from a friend whose opinion I respect, and it helped make up my mind in what I wanted to do. That made the choice clear for me, to take the plunge and join the immersive data science program at Flatiron School. I was excited to get back into coding and this time with Python a much more forgiving language to learn than C++.
A data scientist employs a number of useful skills that make it an attractive field of study to pursue. I have always been a problem solver, it is one of the reasons I pursued an engineering degree in college. Critical thinking is a powerful attribute to have and something that I hope I can build on with a career in data science. The ability to analyze and interpret data to determine outcomes based on what numbers are telling you was a skill I wanted to acquire. Besides, who wouldn’t want to get into a field with machine learning and Neural Networks and Deep Learning. The possibilities are exciting based on the buzzwords alone!
One of the things that attracted me to the field is the increasing trend of companies accumulating and looking to utilize data. The field is also evolving creating plenty of job opportunities for aspiring data scientists.Data Science has always intrigued me even though I didn’t know much about it. I knew it was related to gathering and interpreting large amounts of data and using it to predict trends. The only real world examples I knew of involved professional sports like "Moneyball" in baseball and Daryl Morey's infamous use of analytics in building the Houston Rockets. Using data to find what no one else can see sounded like a challenging problem to solve. The Fact that Data Science is a job that has had an increasing demand in the past 6 years and looks to be on the rise helped make my mind up in to what I was going to pursue. Diving headfirst into a field knowing that possibilities were vast, was an exciting challenge that I was definitely willing to face.
Deciding to join an immersive program for data science isn’t an easy decision, it's a daunting proposition with some risk. I hope to build and use the tools to be able to tackle data problems that seems insurmountable. Now I just hope that my vast knowledge in useless information can turn into something useful. That’s a problem for future me to solve hopefully with some new skills to tackle that problem.
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