I fiddled with creating a blog a while back in graduate school but when work/research needed more and more of my time, that endeavor eventually fell by the wayside and forgotten. However, with the changes that have happened to me in the past year, I decided to start writing down my thoughts again. I want to use this exercise as a metric to assess my evolution in this transition from basic science research into data science.

The career shift was not something I entered into lightly. A change of circumstance provided the catalyst that brought me to this field. Prior to pursuing a career in data science, I worked as a research scientist in a lab at the University of Washington. The group I was a part of studied the genetic and metabolic underpinnings of aging. We managed to parlay our results into several impactful papers and also tried to carve out new research avenues along the way. These were good measures of productivity. Despite this apparent success however, additional funding did not materialize and money eventually ran out for my project. I was laid off shortly thereafter.

As a lifelong learner, becoming a student again and exploring new things (to me) was exciting. Initially, I focused on acquiring the fundamental tools that I would need (python, SQL, revisiting statistics) to become a data scientist. When I felt ready, I enrolled in the Data Science Immersive boot camp at Galvanize. Those twelve weeks flew by fast and before I knew it, I was doing a presentation of my final project and graduated the day after. Of course, that was only the beginning. This field is so complex and expansive that there is always something else to master. So, while I try to find my first role in data science, I continue to take on new tasks, accumulating more knowledge base by taking courses online and absorbing everything data science, as well as exploring and creating new data science projects. The best part of the whole endeavor is that I can say with definite certainty that I thoroughly enjoy the work and the challenges that the work entails. I am ready for more.