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Ethan
Ethan

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What I learned this Week. Week 2.

Here we are at another week. If you are new, this is a thing I do every week where I record each day at the end of the day and end up posting it during the weekend. This is mostly for me and mapping out just how I think but if you happen to enjoy, I say the more the merrier.

Monday

First of all I want to congratulate myself on starting on Monday this week. If you didn't know I am not the biggest fan of talking about myself and especially writing about myself. But here I am, at the end of my workday Monday recording what I learned. I woke up this morning feeling extra unmotivated as I got ready to shower. But I didn't let that stop me, I read more from James Clear and gained good insight into making bad habits disgustingly unattractive. I applied for more jobs and sent more outreach messages. I continued learning about NLP services like nltk and how to generate corpus statistics. And now here I am, at the end of my "work day". So not only did I learn more about Data Science, but I learned to not beat myself up over being unmotivated. To take each step one at a time, as long as they are in the right direction, I will reach my goal.

Tuesday

It's Tuesday. For reasons unknown to me, Tuesdays always seem to be harder than Mondays. My stomach decided to have a flare up today which is never fun. My dog, Jake, and cat, Milli, felt like antagonizing me while I worked by being extra cute/annoying for hours. Today ended up being a day where all I wanted to do was nap with my animals. But that is not what I set out to do. I set out to get a job. I found myself frustrated with a few job applications. Being a "bootcamper", I don't have a college degree and found that more often than not, education sections don't have an area for certificates. Which is quite discouraging and makes me feel like that company doesn't have an open mind about who they are hiring and only care about results on piece of paper. I did end up learning some interesting things about NLP today. I generated my own corpus stats for a small book. I also worked with part-of-speech tagging and context-free grammars, which ended up being a lot of fun if not very confusing at the same time.

Wednesday

Wednesday was quite the blur. I say was because within that blur I forgot to save my draft and lost what I wrote down. So instead here is some bullet points for the day.

  • Tuesday night consisted of miscommunication, hurt and high stress.
  • Woke up anxious from the night before.
  • Attempted to follow morning routine but ended up practicing the art of showing up.
  • Planned a course of action regarding how to properly communicate with my parents.
  • Attempted to do some work and ended up only getting a handful of things done.
  • Executed plan on how to talk to my parents which ended up taking 2 hours and was very exhausting while being just as rewarding.
  • Went to bed.

Thursday

Thursday brought an emotional high and a stable environment for everyone in the house. I woke up with my strong morning routine again and felt great. I checked my emails and found some especially exciting news; I got a interview for a Data Visualization Specialist. Not even two weeks into my job search and I am already getting good responses. This company checks almost all my boxes and could even be described as my "Dream Job". I was hoping for a few interviews for companies that I am not quite as interested in as practice but here we are. I plan to give it my all no matter what. In doing research on the company, I found that they use the program Tableau. Tableau is a tool used for visualizing and analyzing data. I personally have not used the tool Tableau as I usually use Python's packages Matplotlib and Seaborn, but I am excited to try it out. I had a meeting with my career advisor today as well. She helped by steering me in the right direction when it comes to networking with my fellow Data Scientists.

Friday

Friday started off a little different again. I ended up waking up much earlier with a lot of pain throughout my digestive system. I have a few different diseases and syndromes that contribute to this and don't want to get too into it, so I am just going to call it a flare up. My flare up definitely threw a monkey wrench into my morning but I got through it. Instead of applying and searching for jobs I decided to focus on researching more about the company I am interviewing for next week. I found great insight and plan to continue to learn more about Tableau over the weekend and into the coming week.

Thank you for taking the time to read through. Although this is to an audience of one (myself), I appreciate any support and encourage you to follow along as I continue to record what I learn and go through each week as I strive to break into my career as a Data Scientist.

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