I am a lifelong learner, so the field of Data Science provides unique and endless learning opportunities but, when it came to my friends, I could almost hear most of them yelling in my ear: “Don’t do it dude!”. But, you see, those who say that don’t understand my life story, and how I fell in love with the field of statistics during a time where we had to do all the data crunching by hand - as in no computers or calculators.
An instructor makes all the difference in the world. I was 16 when, as part of a dual enrollment program that trained high schoolers to become agronomists, I was taught statistics and experimental design classes. Our teacher, whom we graciously nicknamed “El Tiguere” (Spanish for “the tiger”, a misnomer for a person with a suave demeanor), was an incredibly flamboyant and interesting character. He dressed in mismatched bright-colored clothing and was incredibly energetic. On our first day of class he, after acknowledging to us that his classes were the toughest in the school’s curriculum, promised the class that everyone would pass his classes, even if they didn’t study.
El Tiguere told us that it was important we knew that, no matter what we did -or didn’t do- on his class, he was going to pass us, so he wanted to remove that “did I pass?” question out of our head. Obviously if you didn’t put any effort, you wouldn’t get an A but, the second thing he did, which was amazing, is that he proposed to us that, since his classes were four hours long, if we paid attention, like real attention, for the first two hours of his class, we could do anything we wanted to do on the other two hours, sleep, other class homework, several trips to the bathroom, etc.
El Tiguere was also a gifted statistician and had this uncanned ability to teach difficul subjects with ease. The results? Every single one of us, as far as I could tell, fell in love with his class, and the field of statistics. My love for this field is still here today.
Even though this applies to just about the rest of humanity (love of technology) the second part of this story is my love for computers! From the early 90s I’ve been involved in the field of computers one way or another. But it wasn’t until I had to work with a very large dataset, a nationally representative sample of US high school students, that I fell in love with the field of Data Science. I had to learn how to manipulate such a large sample, and develop a study from it. It was very difficult and the tools I was using were not so good for that. I was able to finish the study after some grueling months but, through all of that, I learned that there are tools out there that make the preparation, analysis, and presentation in meaningful ways of information coming from large datasets so I set out to discover about them.
This took me through multiple classes in Udemy and Coursera; however, the knowledge gained was basic at best, and did not ensure that I - by now in love with the fieldd- could continue working on it. So I started researching different options to a formal Data Science curriculum until I came accross the Learn.co website, and the rest is history.
The field is incredibly large, unique, and complex…but exciting. I can’t wait to get up in the morning and delve into Python, SQL, Tableau, SAS, among other tools. There is so much to learn that a lifetime is not enough! And for a lifelong learner this field is just the thing.