My Beginning Data Science Journey

I have wanted to make a career change for some time now. I have been diagnosing complex electrical and electronic systems for many years and feel like I have reached the peak of that career, so what would I do next? I have been contemplating that question for 7 or 8 years now.

I thought about becoming an accountant, a cloud architect, and a web designer, to name a few. None of these seemed appealing to me, though.

I earned an MBA in 2013 and thought that might launch me into a management position in an electronic manufacturing/maintenance company, but that never came to fruition.

I do love to learn new skills. I also enjoy solving problems, which my current career revolves around, critical thought, analytical thinking, and diagnosis of complex equipment issues.

While still learning about the field and reading, I found 365 Data Science and started their Data Science program. It looked like the complete package, and once completed, I would be ready for a position in the field. Not so fast! The program has a lot of great content, and I have no complaints against it. However, once I started learning the machine learning portion, I realized that I was clueless due to my lack of experience with Python.

So, I was discouraged that I didn’t know Python in-depth and had no desire to learn it.

Months go by; I continue looking for something to do in my next career.

I still get emails about machine learning and data science. In July 2021, I decided to jump back in when I came across the Zero to Mastery website.

I have worked through the Complete Python Developer and the Complete Machine Learning and Data Science programs. In addition, I continue working on the Complete SQL + Databases Bootcamp, The Excel Bootcamp, and the Python for Business Data Analytics & Intelligence programs.

My mindset has changed; I will embrace python development. Perhaps down the road, I will also learn R. However, there is no getting around learning some type of programming for data science. Whether you learn Python or R, you will have to become comfortable with programming.

Data Science is my path, and I am sticking to it!