From Marketer to Data Scientist
A starting personal note about my skills upgrade
This year, I’ve collected 800+ hours of learning, reading, and typing code with one purpose: I want to be able to solve wold problems efficiently using code and data. No, it hasn’t been easy, but it has been worthy.
I suffered professional FOMO
I’m not completely new to coding. I’ve programmed before; I coded with C++ as a teenager, later I got proficient in the web trifecta (HTML, CSS, and JS), and I’ve lead mobile app developments and even created a social media bot, but all have been as a response to my marketing/communications projects’ necessities and lack of technical team members, never with the intention of making a full time living out of it. This year my purpose was different; I want to be able to solve problems primarily with my code and algorithms and make it my primary source of income.
I’ve been a marketing & communications leader for the last 8 years in a variety of companies and countries. I’m obsessed with helping companies and projects to iterate, innovate, and grow. I’ve been able to see how Facebook, Google, and Amazon have changed the way of doing marketing and how this changes literally every day.
Have you noticed that in the last 6 years, the best performing marketing teams are hiring statisticians and mathematicians? Why? Wasn’t marketing about creativity and feeling?
No. Maybe it was, but not anymore. Now we have more data than ever before. Over the last two years alone, 90% of the data in the world was generated. Data never sleeps, and that creates a lot of opportunities for any industry, but, unfortunately, not everyone can translate data into solutions because it is difficult. It takes a lot of hard and soft skills to create a compelling solution.
After suffering a lot of professional FOMO when I was not able to create that efficient compelling solution, I decided that 2019 will be the year of my transition into Data Science. I started with the idea of doing Marketing Data Science, but this idea changes every day that I’m immersed in learning more about the limitless possibilities of DS.
Making it real
A week ago, with a team of 4, I finished a project identifying FEMA Lifeline’s businesses in the San Diego County area and then we mapped those out to aid FEMA in their disaster response and damage assessment. This was the first time I touched and coded GIS, and I loved it. More than I expected.
Previous to that I web scraped 700,000 + Reddit posts from 2 subreddits with the goal of, through Natural Language Processing (converting text to binary data), predict if a subreddit post is from /r/bitcoin or /r/personalfinance. I ended creating a Naive Bayes Machine Learning model that resulted in an accuracy score of 97%. And I loved it.
Right now, I’m working on another project identifying using aerial imagery to classify the roof material of buildings in developing countries using GeoJSON. I don’t love it just now, because it is more difficult than I expected and it has cost me late nights and to be working and learning on flights, but I’m sure I will love it.
Motivation?
It may sound easy, but since I committed my time to this, I’ve had days of 17 hours breathing Python, statistics, algebra, math, Tableau, machine learning, SQL, algorithms, communications, forecasting, and so many other topics. Learning, unlearning, and improving. Solving case studies and starting each day with a codewars problem. So many days that I don’t want to continue anymore because let’s be real: learning is painful. It is frustrating when you ‘don’t get it.’ After all the hours experimenting, the secret is to not to stop.
I believe that motivation is overrated. I achieve the most when I make things happen even on the days when I don’t feel like it. Working without motivation pays off, believe me. There is a point where the ‘knowledge dots’ connect and create the most beautiful neural network. The key is to continue learning.
I wonder where the path of Data Science and AI will take me. I wish I started walking this path before and not in my 30’s, but now is better than never.
This is about you
All this “I and me” text is to give you some context from where I’m coming from, but this is not about me. This will be about you. You might be the one that wants to make a skills upgrade as well. In the next blogs, I will be talking about a couple of short cuts I learned on this journey, and that, hopefully, will help you too.
- I will try to simplify concepts for the ones with nontechnical backgrounds like me.
- I will create some guides for people with a technical background but lack of soft skills or ‘people skills.’
- I will share the code and steps of projects I’ve done and explain them in a way I wish someone had explained them to me.
- I will interview other career transitioners and skills upgraders on their journey.
- I will share resources, tools, hacks, motivation, and everything in between.
Are you with me? Are you a “skills upgrader” as well? Tell me your story in the comments! I would love to learn from where are you coming from.
You ‘made it,’ and do you have any advice for us? Share it on the comments as well; I need them.
Hasta la próxima, and remember:
Keep learning.
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