My career transition from a Data Analyst to Data Scientist
How I remain steadfast in my pursuit of Data Science
6 months ago, I left my role as a Data Analyst to accelerate my learning at Metis Data Science bootcamp. The 3 months course allowed me to learn in a structured way, advance my technical capabilities and gain more professional experience with the up-to-date technologies today. I implemented five end-to-end DS projects that address business challenges and enhance business value. One of them involved an end-to-end recommender system for individuals based on their CLV and product ratings to provide more targeted suggestions that improve user experience and ensure retention.
With my heightened passion for Data Science, I embarked on my next career journey as a DS. However, searching for my next opportunity amidst the COVID-19 pandemic was fraught with challenges and setbacks. A corollary of the pandemic is uncertain business climate, hiring freeze, retrenchment. Nevertheless, finding a job during this uncertain and difficult period has taught me various lessons.
1. A career is a marathon, not a sprint.
While there were bouts of excitement and eagerness as I made it to the last round of hiring processes, there were also disheartening periods of rejections. Instead of being overly dismayed by the outcome, I constantly remind myself to focus on the process, learn something new every day and apply it. Undoubtedly, this was not easily achieved as my results-oriented personality runs contrary to a slow and steady approach.
2. This brings me to my second lesson — perspective shifting.
I remind myself to adopt another perspective when disheartened by declines or worn out from the learning process. For instance, when displaced by applicants with more experience or stronger domain knowledge, I perceive such setbacks as an opportunity to hone my skills, gain more industry knowledge, and prepare myself for my right job out there, but just not visible yet.
After over 70 applications, 30 interviews, numerous take-home assignments and live coding sessions, I’m honoured and thankful to be a Data Scientist at Dell’s Customer Experience Group, and excited to work alongside a talented DS community to improve user experience and ensure retention.
3. This process would not have been possible without the strong support from my family, friends and mentors.
I’m also immensely grateful for my friends for their unwavering support, and mentors for their invaluable guidance and encouragement during this period. Your support and advice have helped me hang in there during this challenging and uncertain business climate. A big thank you to my friends who have kindly agreed to refer me during my job search process too, I truly appreciate your help.
4. As I begin my journey as a Data Scientist, I’m also reminded not to rest on my laurels, and to be always hungry for knowledge.
This Data Science/Artificial Intelligence industry is evolving rapidly every day, with a vast amount of new knowledge to be acquired. To this end, I seek to hone my technical capabilities by taking Deep Learning course, becoming AWS certified, applying state-of-the-art NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques such as BERT on my side projects, such as to recognise users’ intention from their messages, and to extract key phrases from sentences that best describe its sentiment. Currently, I’m participating in Shopee’s largest online competition in Asia (Shopee Code League) where I applied the latest Computer Vision techniques to classify Shopee’s product images into its corresponding categories, and apply Unsupervised Machine Translation to translate Traditional Chinese product titles to English, without the use of parallel data.
I’m eager to develop my skillset to unlock the power of data, empower others to make data-informed decisions and communicate these insights to them, and work towards becoming a Full-Stack Data Scientist in which I build automated and scalable applications for people!
Interested to follow my journey? Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, to exchange ideas or an informal chat. You can check out my write-ups for my other Data Science projects here too :) Take care and stay safe!
