You might be wondering how I got here. Last December, I decided to take a break from my career in order to transition to a new professional path I found more fulfilling. I was sucked into the world of seasonal field technician gigs and I wanted out. I worked in three seasonal positions before moving back home to Syracuse, New York. I panicked and took a job at a construction company in Syracuse, and then quit after realizing that it wasn’t at all where I wanted my life to go. And this is where data science comes in.
I started looking up positions that I wanted and graduate programs that I dreamed of getting into. A common thread was that experience in programming languages like Python and R was a desired qualification for many job postings. This was where I could start changing my life around from collecting data to performing data analysis using programming.
Data science is a field where people use existing data to make predictions, create visualizations, and derive information from analysis to create a narrative for the data. A career in data science seemed like the natural next step for me.
I started off using Udacity. This website offers a huge range of online courses that combine video lessons with assignments in various programs, such as R. The Udacity course that I took was Data Analysis with R. It’s a free course that gives a great introduction to using R.
Currently, I am also taking courses through Codecademy. I took two free courses, Learn Python and Learn the Command Line, and am enrolled in the Introduction to Data Analysis Pro course that costs about $200. Codecademy course length can range anywhere from 10 hours to 10 weeks, depending on subject.
I started this journey about two months ago and hope to keep making progress everyday. Besides Python and R, I also plan on learning about SQL through Codecademy.
See my About Me page for more information.