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Waylon Walker
Waylon Walker

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How did YOU enter Data Science

How did YOU enter Data Science?

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Waylon Walker

I entered data science through Mechanical Engineering. Many of my early projects required analyzing large amounts of data that tools my team traditionally used did not work. I found a passion executing on projects that would typically need to wait for IT.

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Alexandro Disla

How to enter into data science living in a poor country and no available job.

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Waylon Walker

That is a tough one for me to relate to, my hope is that someone with a similar experience can chime in with some real tips.

For me, I was already working for a large company in a role with a computationally intensive background as data science was becoming more common. I did a lot of work on my own to learn everything I could to push my projects forward.

Projects

My recommendation would be to find a project to work on for yourself and try to take it from end to end to show that you have a variety of useful skills that result in actually deploying something useful. You will learn a lot of new things along the way, learn what parts of DS you like and what it is that you want to do. I would find some free datasets online, maybe something that you are passionate about. Clean them up, make some new features, build some models, create some visualizations, then deploy it somewhere that you can share. Most ways of creating visualizations have some free way of hosting these days. I would highly reccomend some sort of free hosting as it will stay on your resume as long as the hosting provider is in business without you paying for it or maintaining it.

Hackathons/competitions

You can also jump into online hackathons or competitions. Things like Kaggle would be a great place to start.

Blog

Document your experience along the way. Each blog post doesn't have to be completely comprehensive knowlege about a particular subject. You can write about the parts that you know, and add your unique story to it.

All of that said, I do not know how all of this results in an actual job in your country in 2020. There might be companies hiring there, agencies there that work with other companies. I honestly don't know of many good remote/freelance options in data science. Many times it requires an element of expertise in the companies data and they typically keep that knowledge in house.

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Alexandro Disla

Thank you. I will follow your advice. I believe, i will mostly doing it by passion. I hope something good will come out of it.