Traveling for Data Science
By: Ata Akca
Tags: General Assembly, Codingbootcamp, Data Science, Learning, Travel

Treasure Island and Bay Bridge (photo by: Ata Akca)

Welcome to my first blog ever. This post will be about traveling all the way from Izmir to San Francisco to become a data scientist. I am pretty excited to be writing this story and hope you readers would enjoy it.

A quick summary of my background. Three different Universities in two different cities (Istanbul and London), seven years of study, three different engineering programs. It took quite a time, trial and error for me to realize my passion for electronics and tech, so I became an Electrical and Electronics Engineer, got my degree from University of Westminster. Meanwhile, I worked for family, got internships every summer in companies I was interested in, inside and outside of Turkey.

Taking examples from success stories, I was awed by the entrepreneurs around the world. So I figured I would give it a shot myself. We partnered up with a friend to establish our own business. We were too young and didn’t have enough experience to make it work, so we took it as a lesson and moved on. After University, I kept my connection to family business while I started working for a Venture Capital firm called StartersHub. We scouted and analyzed startups on a daily basis, held meetings and listened to ambitious people committing to the craziest ideas. My experience there is unmatched, because it constantly answered and stimulated that curiosity part in my brain: What’s New?

In all of these background experiences, I have realized that everyone, every single business needed one thing. Actually I will correct that and say that they almost craved for it. An analyst, someone who can tell what they are doing and how can they do it better. Well, how would I know? I don’t have enough information to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do! Then I proceeded to ask myself the same question, “How would I know?”. The answer was — after countless hours of looking for that answer, asking people and researching information (or should we say data from now?) online — Data Science.

Where? Well, how about I got to the epicenter of technology giants and startups. Learn from the analysts, entrepreneurs, smartest people in tech. Therefore my target was set to San Francisco. I traveled to a city full of people with growth mindset, people who aren’t shy of changing the way things work. Being in this city taught me a lot about what is happening in the industry I was interested in. Being in a coding bootcamp for three months was another story though.

So, how was it after all? My experience as the program draws to an end could be explained in many different ways:

Bootcamp is a bootcamp, don’t expect to have much time to relax and enjoy your personal/social life. It requires individual effort put into learning consistently.

I got to create many projects that relate to real-life situations. For example, predicting economic loss in case of a natural disaster. Or predicting the price of a house, by looking at the features and qualities of the house.

Making amazing friendships, connections and networking. General Assembly (GA) is a very collaborative space. They have events going about tech every week. This enabled me to speak to some big names in the blockchain industry, I am talking about Facebook Calibra, Tron, Ripple. Not just that, we have a dozen of bright people in our class. Gouri is from the industry with 10 years of SAP experience, Ingrid did MS in Stanford and worked for Intel, Jena had her startup on edible crickets which serves as an open source for other enthusiasts in this business, Dennis is an all-round entrepreneur who probably has some considerable amount of knowledge on every buzz word you are about to throw at him. The list goes on…

Outcomes! At some point I need to get a job right? GA taught me how to properly pitch my knowledge, present myself, create a good profile online, write a resume and even prepare me to those interview questions that catches people off-guard.

Learning to learn. As I had limited time, deadlines and responsibilities, I had to come up with ways to learn quicker. Also, learning to let go. No code will be 100% perfect, a basic model you have just learned on week three is not going to predict your favorite pokemon by 100%. Let. It. Go.

Patience. It is worth every blood, sweat and tears.

To wrap this blog up, it has been quite a ride. I can’t wait to use all of the skill I have gained in this program, from technical to professional. The learning and applying part will still continue as is. It was fun writing this post and I hope to continue with more technical ones in the coming weeks. I would like to end by saying that this three months in my life will always be statistically significant in my heart.