I never thought I would have this epiphany.

Why I chose Data Science.

When I discovered data science, I felt like the world had been keeping a bizarre secret from me. Why hadn’t anybody texted me and been like,

“Forest! Listen to me. If you are looking for a career where you can combine your love for repetitive, mundane tasks (let’s face it — preprocessing data is tedious, but I actually do love it) with your love for explaining complex topics (I was a math tutor and worked as iOS tech support for Apple), with your desire to use your technical prowess on projects that can actually make a difference in the world, then BECOME A DATA SCIENTIST.”

Unfortunately, I received no such message and had to reach this conclusion on my own.

One of my biggest struggles has always been trying to figure out where I fit in in the “professional world”. After college, I abandoned my career track because while it had the technical aspect (financial analyst), it never really had the human aspect. Also, I thought I would lose my mind if I spent the rest of my days commuting to an office.

I wanted a job that:

• I could leverage into location-independence.
• Solved unique and interesting problems.
• Allowed me to be my introverted self for part of the time.
• But left plenty of space for me to interact with other humans in a meaningful way.
• Touched a wide breadth of unique and interesting problems.
• Oh and also was high-paying. What? There is nothing wrong with wanting to secure the bag.

It truly would be a bore if I enumerated all the rabbit trails I went down while searching for this mystical career, but let’s just say this discovery didn’t come easy.

Okay, cool.

So I discovered data science — you can’t just snap your fingers and land your first role (unfortunately — is anybody working on this?). My interests were aligned but alas, my skills were not.

Fortunately! Right around the same time, I also discovered ‘bootcamps’. Specifically, I discovered Flatiron’s full-time, fully-remote, five-month Data Science Bootcamp.

There are varying outlooks on bootcamps and if I had to guess, your outlook probably corresponds to your learning style. For the people who say, “Bootcamps are pointless! You can learn everything you need to yourself through free resources on the internet!!”

You are 100% correct! Unfortunately, in order to get through a lot of material, I need a bit of structure to my learning. Flatiron was the perfect blend because while we had daily lessons (not mandatory!) and weekly check-ins with our instructor, it was more or less a very self-guided course. Think of it like going bowling with bumpers on.

The Course.

It was five months long altogether and we covered….. a lot.

We started off with an introduction to SQL and Python, with the focus being heavily on Python. We learned about the primary libraries used in data science (Pandas, NumPy, Seaborn, MatplotLib, ScitkitLearn), as well as how to effectively use and navigate GitHub.

We then had an entire unit on Statistics! Think: A/B testing, Statistical Distributions, Probability Theory, Linear Regression, etc.

Then we moved on to the meat of the course: Machine Learning. This was the most exciting part for me and when I really began to get a feel for what life was going to look like soon.

After being introduced to the basic models used in machine learning, we transitioned into ‘big data’, deep learning, and also NLP.

Throughout the course I completed close to 200 labs, 5 projects using real-world datasets, read through countless lessons and articles on data science, and consumed more videos on gradient descent and neural networks than I care to recount.

Overall? It was awesome.

Now.

Now? I have started the least-fun part of the process: the job search.

It has definitely been a bit of a challenge in these early days. Networking has never been my strong suit and I definitely battle with my fair share of imposter syndrome, but I am learning to trust in the process and trust that the perfect position will come along — yes, even in the time of COVID.

It will. It always does.

Thanks for reading. More technical posts and how-tos are in the pipeline.

🌲🌲🌲 (Forest)