How I “hello-world”-ed to Data Science
Even two years ago, in 2017, I had almost zero idea about programing, let alone data science. I was in my third year of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering studies, struggling hard to become a metallurgist, that’s all what my career goal was. But it changed pretty rapidly after September, 2017.
It started with my google chrome app showing me a page suggestion in my phone, a page which opened a whole new world to me. The page I landed on was MITx — 6.00.1x (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python) course offered at edx.org. I was always interested about computers from my childhood. So I instantly jumped into that course. I found myself pretty comfortable in python programming and in no time I was enjoying python more and more than I ever enjoyed metallurgy. Before landing on that page, I had no idea about the massive MOOC world. So it was really exciting for me to find this awesome way of learning anything I want from the professors of the top universities and top class instructors in the world from my home!
I completed the course. I yet had no idea what should be my next move. I made a silly game (taking help from youtube of course) just to get more familiar with programming. There were lots of things to explore, I was barely scratching the surface. I was in a loss “What should I do next? What should I learn next? What should I start making? What is the next move?” A friend suggested to make a website. But I really wasn’t interested in web designing at that moment, it would require some knowledge of HTML but I didn’t want to move to another language just yet before mastering python first. And luckily, around February 2018, I found a study group! The group aimed to study Artificial Intelligence and was welcoming anyone from any background. It was hard to believe that someone like me, who learned only some basic python coding, were ready to study something as high level as AI! Regardless of that lack of confidence, I decided to join the group.
It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. People from that group were very friendly and open to ideas from anyone. The fear that I would be ignored as I have zero knowledge in computer science was gone just in a couple of meet ups. We explored different courses and books in data science, machine learning and deep learning and continued to learn and help each other. Though I missed most of the weekly meet ups due to my exams and heavy academic schedule, I solved my first Kaggle problem in October, 2018!
The timeline would have been much shorter if I had more free time to spend on coding. As I mentioned, my academic schedules and personal life was a huge obstacle in my time management. Sometimes I had only one day in a week, sometimes only one day in a month, sometimes not even a single day in a month to spend on programming. But the one thing I strictly maintained was to never give up. I knew if I stick to it, my skills would develop over time, may be slowly but it will.
I know there are many people who start learning data science but then due to lack of confidence or slow pace, they lose their interest and stop. It’s very easy to get demotivated. But I would like to suggest anyone who is just getting started in data science (or programing or any other field) to strongly hold their faith in it. The road might be bumpy at first, the progress might be slow, the obstacles might be huge, but success will come eventually and the achievement will be worth all the struggles.
In a future blog post, I will discuss the courses, the books and other resources in details that helped me learning. Hope that will encourage and guide other people who want to say hello to the magnificent world of data.
