My Data Science Journey

Hi, I’m Rachael! I am currently excited and terrified because I just quit my job of five years as a data analytics consultant and enrolled in General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive program. This is the start of my journey into data science and I want to bring you all along for the ride. I hope to tell you all about the cool things I learn and my experience in the weeks to come.

First, I want to tell you a bit about how I got here and where I want to go. As I said, I was working at a small consulting firm as a data analytics consultant. Our clients were primarily trade associations and we focused on collecting data from their member companies to produce industry benchmarking reports. My five years here were awesome! In the span of five years, I worked on projects in many different industries, became an Excel guru, a Qlik Sense wizard, and learned how to manage clients and a small team.

This role was great because there was always new data to work with and data structuring or visualization problems to solve. However, once we started working with really large datasets, I noticed some inefficiencies in how we were managing the data using primarily Excel. I started learning some basic Python, SQL, and relational database best practices and tried to bring some of this to my projects that I worked on. I quickly realized how powerful these tools are for managing data. This was a good idea and helped to make some of my projects more efficient, but it was a pretty slow process trying to implement what I was learning in addition to a regular workload.

This learning and exploratory phase turned out to be really important for me though! Once I started reading about what the top tech companies were doing in their data analytics or data science departments, I was fascinated and knew that this is the community I was dying to be a part of. I love math and problem solving and felt strongly that I needed to dive even deeper into this field.

Then I had the thought “for all the hours I spend at work every day, what if I could use all of that time to improve my data science skills instead?” I was excited at the possibility of what I could learn and how fast I could do this if I were to be a full-time student of data science. This is when I started researching different grad school and bootcamp options and found General Assembly! The GA curriculum was exactly what I wanted to learn to take my career in data science to the next level. I would look at job postings of what I envision to be my dream job, and the GA curriculum covered what these posts indicated they were looking for. I also loved how the program has a strong focus on your career outcome after the program.

After a few weeks of research, talks with friends/family/mentors, and lots of “pros and cons of leaving my job for school” lists, I decided to take the plunge and enroll in the Data Science Immersive program at General Assembly. Normally, I like to play it safe so leaving my comfortable job for the unknown was one of the scariest life decision I have made so far! I am so grateful for how supportive and encouraging my network was about my next steps. They agreed with me that I needed to do this program because constant growth and learning is so important in life. I plan to work really hard at this program and hopefully that hard work will pay off for my future career.

Speaking of my future career- I have a pretty good idea of what I want my carer to look like after I graduate from this program. I would love the opportunity to work in the data science department at a company that provides an awesome product and has a strong online or ecommerce presence. My main goal is to get out of the consulting world and work on the company side where I can have an impact on the business directly. Collecting data about user interactions with the company and using this to information to improve the company’s offerings or user experience is so interesting to me. I love following tech companies, retail companies, and start-ups and watching how they constantly evolve and provide value for their customers using lots of data.

It is so exciting to think that I will be able to use my new data science skills at my new role and make a difference in my future company’s business. Until I get there though, keep following along with me as I progress through this program. I can’t wait to dive deeper into the world of data science and bring you along!

Cheers!

-Rachael