My #SoDS18 Journey

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair…

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…

You can get with this, or you can get with that…

Blue pill, red pill…

Life is not short on metaphors for choice and the paths that confront us daily. As I was closing the first year at my first job out of college, I had to decide whether I would return to the same organization or try to find something different. For various reasons, I never really felt comfortable applying for a job while still putting effort in my current job. Lucky for me, my family’s door was still open and I opted to finish out my lease, my year, and to take a leap to find an opportunity that would lead me closer to a career in data science.

I knew I wasn’t quite ready for the big league in data science. I also knew what I wanted to learn more about. It was right around May that #SoDS18 (Summer of Data Science 2018), a summer in which you plan some data science related goals for yourself and try to complete them, appeared on my timeline. I laid out a grand idea of what I wanted to accomplish and I accomplished some, but not all of my desires. For this post, I wanted to document what I did accomplish. Too often, we are our toughest critic and we miss appreciating just how far we’ve come in our respective journeys.

Overall, my #SoDS18 journey was a success. Let me count the ways:

If I had to pick the single greatest achievement this summer, it would be: I picked up R and actually loved it! There is so much more to learn, but as a learneR, my relationship with R is very different than the first two times I came across it. I understood nothing in the past and thought I never would. Now, I understand the bare minimum, but I'm more optimistic that I can continue picking up new tricks. I also think I've become a slightly better programmer than I was a few months ago. My speed is definitely still slow, but my workflow/thought processes are much improved.
I've released my work via GitHub and this blog! I don't worry so much about being criticized (though I only post things I'm pretty confident about/nothing overly complex), but I do think a lot about publishing things that I feel are impactful. In some ways that is so hard - what is impact? how would I know? I kind of want the validation, but have no tangible way of measuring it, yet. I have a few idle ideas, but I'm not sure how I want to implement them. I think I will have a better grasp of how to solve this dilemma when I have completed my rebranding.
I attended my first data science/technical conference! #PyOhio was particularly special: it was free, it was in Ohio (Columbus, too!), it featured the first time I heard any conference speaker use the phrase "y'all", and I got a first class introduction to Natural Language Processing. In short, it made me feel at home while expanding my horizon - and what more can we really ask for out of the goalposts of life?
I applied for data science leaning jobs! I was fortunate enough to be given a chance, officially as a Data and Operations Specialist. It's not quite data science, but it will allow me to work on the muscles that are integral to a career in data science in a way that my past job could not. I (mostly) loved the work I was doing this past year, but it always felt that I was attracted to something else. The data stuff always widened my eyes. Now I get to give that something else a shot. #EternallyGrateful