Bike Bum to Data Scientist?
For the majority of my adult life, I have been a bum. That’s right, a bum. The majority of my close friends and myself are more or less wandering vagabonds. Other people call us homeless. Many live in their vehicles. One friend lives with her husband and 3 kids in a huge trailer. I tend to float around from place figuring it out as I go. One place we often meet at for a few months every year is Virgin, Utah. We spend hours and hours hanging out in the desert riding mountain bikes. Often times riding down narrow ridges or even jumping off cliffs. Remember that old saying that everyone’s parents said when we were younger? “If your friend jumped off a cliff, would you?!”. Yes. Yes I would. How did I get into all of this, you ask? I hope you asked that, because I’m about to tell you.
When I was 18 I moved away from my ultra-religious family in Salt Lake City, Utah. I wanted to get away from the family, but didn’t really want to leave the state because I loved the outdoors and had a good number of friends. I settled on St. George Utah with the idea that I would go to the local college there. In reality, I ended up rock climbing or mountain biking most of the time. My grades were less than stellar, but I didn’t care. I had no idea what I wanted to do long term other than my sports. Eventually I dropped out of college and worked at a bike shop. I would work for a few months, save all my money, and then go travel somewhere until I was completely broke and had to come crawling back to Utah to ask for my old job back. After years and years of this cycle of penny pinching and groveling for work, I decided that enough was enough. I needed a big kid job.
My younger brother had went to the same college and studied Computer Science. He was always at his computer working on something or other. If you were nice enough to pretend to listen, he would ramble on and on about whatever it was he had been working on lately. It was easy to tell that he enjoyed it. When time came for me to get a little more serious about life, my brother suggested I look into coding. He gave me a list of possible routes, one of them being machine learning (with a note that he thought it was cool as hell). I felt that was a bit out my depth at the time. I decided to focus on learning the basics of Python, then took a class for web development with React. I got to the end of the class and it sunk in that web dev really wasn’t my cup o’ tea. After being frustrated for ‘wasting’ a lot of time (it actually wasn’t a waste), I decided to just dive into Machine Learning. I met a machine learning engineer at a meetup who steered me towards Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning and Deep Learning courses on Coursera. I. Was. Hooked. I finished those courses in a few months and loved every second. Almost 2 years later and I still find joy in training a new model.
This leads us to now. I am currently living in Costa Rica and attending General Assembly’s Data Science Immersive program remotely (thanks COVID!). We are 3 weeks in, and so far I have been extremely impressed. Not only by my instructors (who both have years of industry experience as Data Scientists) but by the caliber of my fellow classmates. Such a diversity of backgrounds and skill sets. It’s quite cool to see. I’m excited for the many weeks to come!
